FIMBY: When to plant summer vegetables

This is another in our “Food in My Back Yard” series, dedicated to edible gardening.

April is Sacramento’s gardening sweet spot: The weather is just about perfect for being outdoors. In the vegetable garden, cool-season crops are nearing maturity while warm-season favorites are ready to plant.

Managing space in these overlapping seasons can feel like juggling reservations at a popular restaurant – everybody wants that same sunny spot.

Don’t push out the peas before they’re done just because some tomatoes are lined up to take their place. Those cool-season crops took weeks or months to get to this point; why pull them (and waste their potential produce) just to get an early start on something else?

Vegetables are more flexible than people. The whole summer garden doesn’t need to be planted in one April day. Instead, focus on windows of opportunity and succession.

Planning and patience are important gardening skills. Planning lets gardeners make the most of available opportunities. Patience lets nature take its course.

Weather will be the biggest variable in any vegetable garden. (The seed packet may say those radishes are ready to harvest in 40 days, but only if they got enough sun, warmth and water.) So, plan for that, too. That’s succession planting; for example, plant a row of radishes a week over four different weeks instead of planting the whole seed packet at once. Spreading out the planting dates lengthens the harvest as well as makes allowances for less than ideal weather.

The same goes with tomato transplants. Don’t plant them all on one day; stagger their transplants over several weeks – or even months.

Last year’s tomato crop served as interesting lesson about the importance of staggered planting times. In our community garden, the bulk of tomatoes were transplanted the last week of April – the traditional tomato transplanting time in Sacramento. But intense heat in early and mid May – just as those young bushes were flowering – dried up tomato pollen, so those plants set no fruit.

But bushes planted in early April and June had abundant tomatoes, because their flowers were able to pollinate when it wasn’t above 95 degrees.

In addition, bushes planted really, really late – after the Fourth of July – produced big crops in October and November, thanks to warm fall weather.

So much for only planting tomatoes the last week of April.

There are some basic guidelines about when to plant, thanks to ag science. Remember: Only use guidelines designed for where you garden.