BY JANE BLOODWORTH ROWE
VIRGINIA BEACH — The final days of winter can bring cold winds and rapidly fluctuating temperatures to Virginia Beach, but they also bring robins and budding red maples. With some luck, it also delivers the drier soils that allow produce farmers and home gardeners to begin their early spring planting.
This time of the year, when we’re on the cusp between winter and spring, is possibly my favorite time of the year despite the challenging weather. Many cool weather vegetables – including most leafy green vegetables, radishes, onions and May peas – can be planted in late February or March.
If you’re extremely well organized, you can start even earlier in containers, but I’m not one of those well-organized people.
That’s why it helps to work with others who are organized and very knowledgeable, and I’ve had the privilege of working with the Virginia Beach Master Gardeners at the Farmers Market Kitchen Garden at the Virginia Beach Farmers Market at Princess Anne and Dam Neck roads.
Planning is a crucial first step in gardening because plants should be grouped, in part, according to size, compatibility and need for sunlight and moisture. Some vegetables are also disease-prone and shouldn’t be sown in the same area each year.
The next step to planting is to replenish the soil by adding compost and an organic fertilizer because the nutrients may have been depleted by the previous year’s crops. If possible, let it set for a couple of weeks so that the compost can work itself into the soil before you plant. Sometimes, it helps to add topsoil and, when necessary, amend the soil to improve the texture by adding perlite, sawdust or peat moss.
After the soil has been amended, you can begin planting early crops, and, on a recent day, we planted onions.
I have to confess that I’d never given onions much thought. I’d never realized how many varieties there are. We focused on candy onions — or a variety of white or red sweet onions called candy onions, or allium cepa — that have a mild, slightly sweet flavor. Onions require several hours of sunlight to form a bulb, and these onions are known as intermediate day onions. That means that they do well in the mid-Atlantic region
I also began to plan for the container herb garden that’s part of the Farmers Market demonstration garden. Right now, it looks a bit scraggly since most of the herbs are still dormant, and I’m not sure that some perennials, including the lemon verbena, survived.
Even the very hardy lemon balm — which, in some years, has remained lush and green all winter — has been reduced to a few almost barren twigs.
Still, there’s plenty of time for it to revive, and I’m looking forward to putting out new plants, including insect repellants such as pennyroyal, citronella, and lemon grass.
I’m also trying to decide about cool flowers, or those whimsical, ephemeral early spring bloomers that I love so much. There are still plenty of pansies around from last fall, but if you missed the fall planting season, you can set them out now for spring blooms.
It’s also time to set out snapdragons, and this year I also want to plant some sweet peas, which I’ve never grown but always loved.
It may almost be too late for them because this very cold hardy flower can actually be planted in the fall for spring bloom, but I will take my chances and hope that we don’t have an early heat wave.
Meanwhile, I’m looking for signs that my bleeding heart plant will return this year. This beautiful plant blooms until about June, then goes dormant in the summer heat and sometimes dies into the ground until the next spring.
When it’s in bloom, though, it’s so beautiful that it has an almost fairytale quality. Like ornamental cherry blossoms and budding red maple, it seems to encapsulate everything that’s so magic about this time of the year.
For a list of planting dates for spring and summer vegetables, visit Virginia Cooperative Extension Service online via pubs.ext.vt.edu and search for the “Virginia’s Home Garden Vegetable Planting Guide” publication.
The author is a contributor to The Independent News. Her journalism has also appeared in The Virginian-Pilot.
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