If March felt busy, welcome to the beginning of our gardening lives, starting now! April is when I start to fire on all cylinders, when my winter hibernation crafts take a back burner for the season, and when, finally, we take daily walks in the garden to witness life emerging right before our eyes.

We are enduring a downright languid spring arrival, no thanks to the week of cloudy, snowy and damp weather we’ve had. It’s felt more wintery that springlike, which, in turn, does a number to my mental game. I’m feeling tired of winter’s lingering and yet, when I look at my teeny hot season seedlings germinating there’s more than an ounce of me that is screaming, you’ve waited too long. (This voice will never go away, I’m just learning to say ‘hey, what’s up. settle down. it’s gonna be fine.’)

Instead of rushing to get my main season flowers started, I’m sitting back and trying to decide if I roll the dice with my battered earliest brassica succession and transplant them … with a low of 22F forecast for Monday night. (I think I will roll the dice, since they’ve endured round one of near-death experiences, what could possibly go wrong in round 2?)

These plants got torn up by being left outside, uncovered, when the low was close to 20F. It was one of my gravest gardening errors in years, but also, as you can see above, not all is lost. The most hardy of the bunch include my bok choy and kailaan sprouting broccoli. You better believe I turned around and sowed more kaikaan broccoli! I completely lost all red cabbages, but my celery seems to have limped itself back to life, along with the thyme. The parsley also made it.

In addition to sowing many more vegetables, April is when the vast majority of my annual flowers get seeded too, mostly indoors because I’m not ready to test out everything direct seeded. Though, to be fair, you can direct seed all of the flowers I’m indoor sowing this month. The catch is you need to wait another month to sow them, and that’s around the time I’m transplanting mine which yields a garden of flowers by July.

All that being said if you’re feeling behind, take heart. I feel extremely behind with a LOT of my seedlings this season, in particular my celery, brassicas, and flowers. And even my peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants that are just germinating this week give me pause. They seem so tiny and delicate, but I know from experience they will grow quickly this month and be garden-ready before long.

Last chance to prune

If you’e put off pruning fruit trees or shrubs, this is the last weekend, especially up north, to do it. Be sure to time it for a stretch of sunny, breezy days so the cuts will heal over quickly and without moisture, that boisterious disease-carrier.

Check out our espalier pruning video from last year to see how we go about pruning our fruit trees.

Spring Cleanup & Garden Planning

This is a task I didn’t finish in fall, so I’ll be joining you in tidying up beds, weeding, and adding a solid 1-2″ of compost atop all our beds before we plant. And speaking of empty beds, this is prime garden planning season too.

I encourage you to use this month to visualize the space (across the seasons!). Where will your tomatoes go this year? What about your cucumbers or beans? Are you dreaming of a wheelbarrow of pumpkins? Where will they ramble? Do you need to build or add trellises to your space? You get the idea here.

While we wait for soils to warm, assuming your garden is built, this is a great time to really dig into the full season plan so when you drop those seeds or transplants in the ground you know whether you’ll be utilizing that space in mid-summer for a second or third quick succession of crops.

Hardening Off / Cold Vernalizing

Taking the proper time to harden your seedlings off is vital to a smooth transplant. Be sure to follow my tips here.

Here’s a hardening off schedule for you to follow.

• Early brassica tray including bok choy, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, and kale
• Alliums: onions, shallots, leeks, and garleek
• Cold vernalizing artichokes (in same tray as brassicas)
• Early sweet alyssum, snapdragons, and poppies (all sown indoors in soil blocks)

Potting Up

If you have tender annuals that are growing like crazy and your last frost isn’t for another month or so, potting up is in your future. For the first time ever (!!), I don’t have a slew of plants outgrowing their soil blocks right now, so potting up isn’t on my radar right now.

It will be in a few weeks, at which time I expect to pot up tomatoes and possibly peppers into 4″ soil blocks. I wait as long as possible because this ends up taking up a LOT of space under our lights.

What to Sow Now

Cold Hardy Crops

We remain in great position to direct seed cold hardy crops, especially here where we are having a slow warm up. Seeds should germinate quickly so long as you water them well in the coming week or two.

While I’m not sowing all these things direct seeded, this is a list of what I consider possible to plant right now if your soils are reading between 45-55F with a meat or soil thermometer.

Direct Seed

(soil temps 45F or warmer)

• Radish
• Salad turnips
• Green onions
• Arugula
• Spinach (last chance for most varieties)
• Cilantro
• Bok Choy
• Broccoli
• Kohlrabi
• Kale
• Broccoli Raab
• Mustard Greens
• Leaf lettuce
• Head lettuce
• Parsnips (must NOT forget to do this!! Now until mid-May is a good time to sow for a fall harvest)
• Peas^
• Beets^
• Carrots^

^Soil temps at 50F for direct seeding

Indoor Sowing

• Head lettuce (while you can direct seed, I prefer to give this an indoor head start)
• Cabbage (red, green, savoy)
• Napa cabbage — last call for an early summer harvest
• Broccoli (heat tolerant varieties like Covina or Belstar)
• Beets
• Fennel
• Tomatoes (will be sowing our determinate paste tomatoes at some point … might direct seed all of them this year)
• Peppers
• Eggplants
• Peanuts (in 3.25” newspaper pots), late April
• Brussels sprouts (my one and only succession planting of this for the year happens in late April), late April

Herbs

• Lemongrass
• Parsley
• Basil (mid-April for a late May transplant)

I’m also starting to try to grow my own sweet potato slips from the locally-grown sweet potatoes I bought at our coop last fall and that overwintered in our dry root cellar really well. It should take about 6 weeks to grow slips, which should time out perfectly for a June planting.

Flowers to Sow in April (2-4 weeks before last frost)

Well, this is probably the biggest thing on my mind aside from potting up tomatoes and peppers right now. I have high ambitions of having even more flowers in our garden this year, because looking at it bare all winter has me questioning what the heck we were thinking in 2021 expanding our garden. I don’t regret it. The solution is simple: more flowers! And it will be stunning.

Here are the flowers I sow in April every year. I’ll be sowing all of these next week. Sometimes I sow them the first week of April, though that’s not happening this year. My drop dead date is April 15, 2-4 weeks before my last frost:

• Sesame
• Cosmos
• Zinnia
• Nasturtium
• Marigold
• Sweet alyssum
• Sunflowers (sow in newspaper pots end of April)

What Not to Sow Yet — waiting until May

I am not sowing any cucurbits just yet – watermelon, muskmelon, summer squash, zucchini, winter squash, and cucumbers all wait until around Mother’s Day and all get sowed into a 3.25” newspaper pot.

I won’t sow any potatoes, corn, or snap beans or dry beans until the very end of April, unless the soil temperatures warm up quickly. I used to sow all these around mother’s day weekend (second sunday in May) though I’ve been pushing it earlier for snap beans and corn over the past several years.

Lastly, I am holding off on a number of herbs, notably the ones I trialed last year and quickly learned direct seeding is likely a better route. This includes fenugreek, cumin, nigella, and mustard seed.

We are also growing Red Fife Wheat this year (if I remember to do this!) and I’m not sure when to plant that. I’ll let you know when that happens and why.

I hope this list gives you a lot to consider. There are innumerable possibilities for both indoor sowing and transplanting as well as just direct seeding a garden this spring.

The more you add some quick maturing crops, the easier it will be to succession plant in June, July, and August, the sweet spot for turning beds over for a true fall garden.