A Medley of Successions
April is the month of intense succession planting from start to finish for me. Each week is a new season of seeds begging to be pressed into soil either indoors or directly into the earth. It’s a month full of planted seeds that we will eat both in mere weeks and in a year from now, from radishes to canned tomatoes. It’s the height of sowing flowers for me right now too — I am about 4-5 weeks before my last frost here. This year it’s probably gonna be 6 weeks with our luck.
It’s a wild mess inside my head, but I have come to lean heavily on my online spreadsheets I can reference year over year to know what I sowed when the previous year. Even with the spreadsheets, I often feel like a deer in headlights some days, paralyzed by possibility. There are so many possible ways I could spend my time, how do I choose what gets my attention?
I tend to really enjoy building a garden from scratch, and so in some ways my annual seed sowing is part ritual and part adventure. I lean into my past spreadsheets as a bridge between anxiety and adventure, between overwhelm and curiosity. Many days I find myself firmly planted in the middle of the bridge, unsure of which direction I’m going. I choose this beautiful and deeply present lifestyle because what grows from it literally and proverbially is immeasurably joyful and delicious.
I try to focus on things that have a tighter sowing window, successions who have a niche season in which to thrive. So right now, that’s game on for the tomato seeds — it’s truly now or never for them in zone 4. This is my second and final tomato succession of the growing season. I started sowing two successions of tomatoes a few years ago for a few reasons.
First, it was really to try to push out the harvest to coincide with back to school in early September. Then covid hit and back to school took on a new meaning. But once I made this shift, I also realized it meant fewer tomato teenagers indoors — and that saves space, soil, and energy. It’s a great compromise and the determinate tomato plants I sow in early April ripen starting around mid-August into early September.
Besides these time-sensitive tomatoes, what else am I focusing on this month indoors with seed starting?
Flowers
Early in April, I sow more cool season flowers indoors for an early transplant and some early season color. This includes sweet alyssum and calendula, both of which we grow a few varieties — Rosie O Day, Royal Carpet, and white alyssum and Zeolights, Resina, and Alpha calendula.
I also start to sow my summer flower successions. I start with my beloved zinnia, and then move onto marigolds, cosmos, and nasturtiums. This has already started this week, and will continue next week as well. I am trialing spacing out my flower successions so I can pace both my sowing and transplanting schedule. It’s a LOT of plants to plant and mid-May is full of long days in the garden with flats of veggies and flowers … and lots of pondering.
The good thing about all the flowers I am currently sowing? They can be sowed anytime from now through several weeks after last frost and flourish throughout summer and early fall.
