FIMBY: Seeds or transplants for cool-season veggies?

This is another installment in our Food in My Back Yard series, focused on edible gardening.

October starts tomorrow, and this vegetable gardener is finally thinking of planting for the cool season ahead.

Some folks started their plants from seed back in August or even late July. So transplants are the only choice for the late planter, right?

Nope — though it depends on what you want to grow, how much space is available and how much time you want to spend on the cooler garden.

A spin through a nursery’s vegetable section and seed racks showed what is available now — many good choices, a few stay-away ones. Let’s look at the options.

Best for transplants

Transplants are perfect for a gardener with small spaces or a limited desire for winter vegetables.  Several vegetables that take a long time to germinate and/or to grow — and require considerable space — are good candidates for transplants. Buy a sixpack of cauliflower and maybe trade three of those plants with a friend who chose Brussels sprouts. Broccoli, kohlrabi and cabbage also fall into this category.

Best for seeding

The vegetables that do best seeded directly in the garden generally are ones that produce many plants for harvest, while taking up less space. Growing quickly is a bonus, but that’s not always the case: Carrots take longer to mature than radishes, for example.

The best fast-growing vegetables to sow are the leafy greens: Loose-leaf lettuce of all varieties, arugula, spinach, kale, collards, mustard and pak choi. Now is also when you can start seeding cilantro — Sacramento’s mild, cool fall is perfect for it.

Any of these vegetables can be succession planted,  if space is available. Many also do well in containers, even window boxes.

A side note on carrots: Avoid transplants. The photo above shows why: The roots of the plant are what will be harvested, yet they are jammed into nursery sixpacks. The taller plants already have roots wrapped around the inside of the cellpack. Yet this is a plant that does not like its roots disturbed! The smaller plants have roots about 1 inch long, so if you’re growing veggies with children, this size would be a good option. The plants already are viable — carrot seeds can take 10 to 25 days to emerge — but not so big that they are doomed. Plant gently.

Another note: Carrots must be thinned to have room to grow. So a cell with 12 tiny shoots might result in just two mature carrots; if you’re lucky, 12 from a sixpack. Do the math: A seed packet is about $4 for many rows of carrots.

Turnips and parsnips are other root veggies that should be direct-seeded.

A fun discovery: Some of the smaller vegetable seeds (carrots and lettuce) now come on seed tape inside a regular seed packet. This makes planting (and spacing) even easier. Check out the seed racks.

Well, it depends

This third category is determined by the gardener’s personal taste and patience. Love beets? Great, buy several seed packages, be sure to soak the seeds overnight, and then direct seed. Don’t forget to thin them! Beet greens are edible, especially small, so this really is a double crop.

Impatient for beets? Are they favored by only one person in the house? A sixpack or two, say transplants of different varieties, could be enough to satisfy the beet lover, who will have less of a wait for germination.

Swiss chard also works like this. Several years ago I bought two 4-inch plants at a plant sale. The red-stalked variety grew and grew into a gorgeous 5-foot-tall plant that gave us plenty of chard. The yellow-stalked variety just sat there, but I didn’t need more than I was getting.

Onions? It’s too late to start seeds, but onion seedlings and onion sets (the small bulbs) can go in now. Likewise celery or fennel transplants.

And what of peas? They can be sown in late winter, but I think fall is better — the weather is cooling off when they mature, not warming up. Transplants work fine for a small yield — or snacking in the garden! — but to get an excellent repeating harvest, seeds are the way to go. And pea shoots are great in salads.

The Sacramento County master gardeners have many publications on vegetable growing, but perhaps the most valuable one is Environmental Horticulture Note (EHN) #11, “Sacramento Vegetable Planting Schedule.” Even with the seasons shifting a bit thanks to climate change, this is a great guide on when and how to plant. Find the link to the pdf on this page, under the “Master Gardener Publications, Studies and Videos” heading. Also check out GN 154,  “Soil Temperature Conditions for Vegetable Seed Germination.”