For week 4 of the Grow This Throwdown Academy, WVU Extension Horticulture Specialist Dr. Lewis Jett talks about vegetable garden. He offers some helpful advice for our 2025 Grow This crops: chives, lettuce and cucumbers. And at the end, he takes questions from viewers.
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Grow This Academy. Um today is April 22nd, 2025 and it’s a nice day here in Charleston and we’re going to talk about vegetable gardening. just some topics related to the the crops that you’re you’re you’re growing in the grow this program and maybe just some general principles of gardening. Uh I’m Lewis Jad. I’m the horiculture extension specialist at West Virginia University Extension. Um I work with vegetables, fruits, small fruits, herbs, and flowers. And so I’m happy to take any questions that you may have um later online or maybe you you can email your questions to me at a later date um if you if you think of some questions later. So anyway, we’re we’ve got a lot of different crops that we can grow in the garden. um you know, you just have a small sampling of vegetables and herbs in your uh grow this program, but we’re we’re entering into the really um busy time of gardening moving into late April and May. We’re still not past our frostfree date here in West Virginia, which will be for depending on for the southern counties, uh very early May, uh and the more northern counties, um miday. So, we’re we’re kind of watching those dates when to plant some of these crops, particularly your cucumbers, which are frost sensitive. But anyway, so we’re going to look at some seeds. We’re going to look at some sewing techniques. Um, you know, this is there’s still plenty of time to peruse the the um the seed cataloges and and and order more more seeds of of vegetables and and um and herbs and flowers. Uh we have a really long growing season ahead of us here. Um, and some of these crops that you have in the grow this program, uh, you can seed in midsummer or even late summer. So, um, we’ll look at that in a moment. Anyway, um, so your seeds, you know, come in these paper envelopes. Um, and that’s a good really good way to store them. I usually store my seed in just a, you know, a box, a dry box or cedar box or something like this, or I put them in a ziploc bag and put them in the refrigerator. But when you do have extra seeds, any that may be left over from this year’s project, uh, just store them in a cool, dry place uh, for next year or if you’re not sewing them all this spring uh, and you want to sew them in in late summer or maybe early fall, you can have them stored until then. Um, always consult the garden calendar. The 2025 garden calendar is an excellent resource for everyone to look at and sort of schedule um, how you plant things. um we had recommended just on the garden calendar for April 20th to to to uh seed chives as an indoor plant for transplants, which you could have done, you know, four weeks earlier or five weeks earlier, but um you basically if you chose to to seed your chives as a transplant, then uh you’ll be planting after the frost-free date, u typically a six week old transplant. So maybe give it a month and a half to uh reach the size where you can transplant it out in the garden. Uh you probably wouldn’t want to sew chives out in your garden until we’re past that frostfree date. So that would be kind of a a point where I would decide whether to plant uh in the garden these chives. But let’s look at the individual crops. Um you have lettuce as one of your your crops, which is measculine lettuce, which is a a leaf lettuce. very easy crop to grow. Uh it’s basically, you know, just handseed and usually not transplanted. So, if you’ve looked at the seeds already, you see that they’re very small. Um they’re not round. They’re sort of um elliptical shaped. So, they’re a little bit hard to handle, but you could seed them, you know, now in your garden or in a container like what I brought here. So, this is a 12 by 6 inch container. This is what we use for some of our herbs. And I just filled it with um with some standard potting soil, and it’s a light textured potting soil. Moistened it down real well. Um and this would be excellent for seeding something like lettuce and growing this um on your porch or on your patio as a container plant. So, as you look at the seeds for your lettuce, you know, very small seeds, you’re basically, you know, just hand sewing these um onto the soil and then you can water them in. Uh they’re very shallow seeded, so you really don’t want to go very deep with lettuce seed at all. And uh we recommended in your your um guide book to plant 24 to 30 seeds per foot. um because you have basically one lettuce plant every half inch and you don’t have to be that precise. But you can just sew it either in little rows or you can just broadcast it over the soil and and sew it that way. And then when you water this in, the seed will get into the soil and start germinating. So it may take seven days for the um the seed to start emerging on the lettuce. So now is a perfect time to sew lettuce if you haven’t done so yet. either in a container or in your garden. Um, it’s a cold tolerant. Uh, it’s tolerant of frost, so it’s not going to be damaged by frost, so there’s plenty of time to harvest that. What I would recommend on the lettuce is maybe doing multiple sewings of lettuce where you do one sewing every two weeks or every three weeks so that you don’t run out of lettuce through the um spring and early summer. So, you may just say, “I’ll just do one container or one small patch of my my uh garden bed in lettuce, and then I’ll save some of the seed for a later sewing two or three weeks later.” And when you have the lettuce, you know, germinating, growing, um, you know, it gets three or four inches tall, you can get a you can start cutting it. Uh, you can take multiple cutings off of it and get some fresh green lettuce throughout the u throughout the year with this masculine lettuce. Uh the lettuce would be an excellent companion plant with something like the cucumber. So if you are growing your cucumber um in the in a raised bed or in your garden, you may grow this as your your plant um that you can grow lettuce around as a companion plant. So the cucumber would be a good companion plant for the lettuce and also for the chives as well. So uh I have chive seeds that I I get from some other seed company. You have your seed packet of chives. Um, chives are a cutting herb and they’re related to onions. So, they’re in onion family. One thing I wanted to make uh clear to you is that chives are a perennial, which means that they they live longer than one year. So, when you sew them this year, um you will have two or three years of production off of them. You just have to make sure that they don’t get too too crowded in the uh in the pot or in the uh in the garden or the garden space that you have. So you you actually may need to divide them next year when they start getting really clumpy uh and pretty large. But your chives should be seated um now either as a transplant or you can sew them like I said later after the frost date directly into the soil if you’re going outside in the garden with it. And um you can transplant them uh or like I said go with the direct seated method uh on the chives. The chives can grow all summer and they’ll they’ll take the heat fairly well, but just make sure you you water them regularly throughout the summer months. All these crops uh would benefit from some level of just even watering. The lettuce, you know, takes up a lot of water, so make sure you water it every day. Maybe you want to water it in the morning, maybe in in the afternoon, but it definitely needs to be watered regularly every day. Excuse me. So, you have a pickling cucumber, which is exciting because you’re going to be able to make pickles later uh this season. And um so, your pickling cucumber could be grown in a container like this, but preferably in a container that’s a little bit bigger, even bigger than this grow bag that we have here. um you probably need something that’s three to five gallons in in size. So um growing your cucumbers in a in a five gallallon bucket or if you can get a grower a larger container that might be three to five gallons in volume that would be perfect for for your cucumbers. Your cucumber may need to be trellised. So you can put it in an area that needs to be it can climb up a fence or some type of of string or netting. Uh or you can just let it grow horizontal in the ground and pick the cuc cucumbers as they as they mature. And like I said earlier, you can grow lettuce right under your cucumber plant. So if you want to have the lettuce shaded by the cucumber on a trellis, you can seed the the leaf lettuce under the cucumber canopy and uh and let the the cucumber shade the u the uh the lettuce um the lettuce plants. Um there are so many other vegetables that you can grow. You know, this is a perfect time of the year to um start um you know, seeding some of the cool season crops that you can grow in early summer. Like we’re doing broccoli right now. So, we’re we’re planting broccoli. We’re seeding broccoli. So, you can actually seed broccoli um seeds. I have some broccoli here that we we’re putting in one of our test plots. And uh if you want to do cabbage, now is a perfect time to do cabbage. Um or even cauliflower. um as a good cool season early summer crop. And um also uh it’s still too early to plant tomatoes and peppers, but you can seed them as transplants. You know, get get your own containers for growing the transplants and then just plant them uh as a as a four or six week old transplant if you seed them now. So that would be a good way to u to grow a warm season crop. Okay. So, um, these crops I think will be interesting for you to grow. I tell gardeners every year, just try something new. And I think some of these crops are probably new for you. Uh, the chives are probably something that, um, you haven’t, um, grown before, but it’ll be a really nice um, cutting herb that you can put into salads. Um, and you can use it to flavor other other vegetables, too. And I think you’ll like the cucumbers either as a slicing cucumber, but also as a pickled pickled cucumber. um as well. And uh the lettuce like like I said, just make sure you harvest it when the leaves are about, you know, two, four, you know, no more than six inches long. Then you’re harvesting it about two inches above the soil line so it keeps regrowing. You should be get able to get three harvests off of your lettuce u planting. So um just just getting one harvest, you know, don’t don’t think that you’re done. the plant will regrow and you’ll be able to make a second harvest and probably a third harvest as well. But it it’s also nice, like I said, to do a second seeding or a third seeding so that when the first seeding is done, you’ll have other other lettuce to uh to harvest a little bit later on in the year. So, um just make sure you get good quality seed um and um and store your seed as I mentioned earlier uh if you’re not being able to use it or you may want to share it with other folks who don’t have seed. um those who participated in the grow this program last year where you you had kale. So kale is a bianial plant which means that it flowers the second year. So if it is flowering now u it’ll form seed pods on it that you can harvest the pods when they’re dry. So make wait until the seed pods are dry. Shell the the seed out of it and then you can you could use that as seed for another planting of kale um either this uh this spring um and probably preferably for this fall would be a good fall crop to grow as a leafy green. So um I don’t know if there are any questions that are coming in but I’m happy to field any questions that anybody has. We had a grower who said they’re their lettuce is growing, but it’s crowded and they’re struggling to weed them now because they’re clumped up and they worry about weeding and pulling out good. Yeah, I wouldn’t bother thinning the lettuce at all. Just, you know, it’s it’s usually um leaf lettuce. You know, this is this is not head lettuce. So, um like I said, we’re we’re going for half an inch between plants, which is pretty dense. seeding. So, don’t worry if if you have some seeds that may be clumped together. Um the plant will just grow new leaves, you know, out of that clump and you can just snip the leaves off with the scissors. So, um it’s pretty hard to to crowd lettuce, leaf lettuce too much. Um just make sure you know you’re if you are watering it, you’re not overwatering it. You know, they need water. It’s a fine balance, but you could overwater them and then trigger some sort of mildew or something that might cause them to to rot. But um yeah, just just make sure you harvest them before the leaves get too big. Um and um it’ll keep regrowing back even though it might be a little bit thick. If there are any weeds that come up, um well, the lettuce is a pretty good competitor against weeds. So, you know, I was saying mulch some things. The mulching of the cucumbers would be a good idea. It’s kind of hard to mulch lettuce because it’s so densely seated, but um if it is thickly seated, it usually crowds out other weeds. So hopefully that’ll be the the case here. Um and maybe the good news is some weeds are very are edible. So, you know, if they are in the mix, sometimes they’re they’re they’re another leafy green because wheat, chickweed, you know, which is a regular weed that grows during the winter and crest, which is um winter crest, which is a a weed, it gets mixed in with our lettuce and spinach sometimes and and we eat it just the same. But um so anyway, yeah, hopefully you don’t have any huge gaps in the in the planting where weeds can get, you know, uh crowd start crowding them out. But lettuce should should um compete pretty good good against the weeds. We had someone ask when they should plant Swiss chard. Well, Swiss chard is one of those those garden vegetables that you can you can plant it anytime. It’s perfect. You know, actually lettuce is like that, too. Uh you can grow, you know, lettuce year round. You can grow Swiss chard year round. And um so yeah, if you have a really nice variety of Swiss chard that you like, um you can go ahead and seed it now. You can go you can grow it as a transplant if you want. Um and it’ll take the heat really well. Uh it’s actually my hot weather replacement for spinach. Um is either the um the chard or or some of these other Asian greens. But um yeah, we like the white stem chard uh which is the Ford hook or there’s a variety called Argentada. But some people like the bright lights mix which is a multicolored uh chard mix. And um and chard is a lot like lettuce too. You can harvest it as a baby leaf uh crop. So if you just want to sew it really thick, you can just clip the leaves off and and use it like a lettuce in salads. or you can wait till the leaves get big big like kale leaves and just cook it as a like a cooking green um like you do with kale but either either way and it’s it’s considered to be one of the most uh nutritious vegetables uh to eat um as well um I just want to say one thing you know there might be an issue about whether you transplant something or direct seeded seeding is is easier to do sometimes and you but you have to thin it you know sometimes you particularly these these seed seeds that we have here which are very small. Sometimes you may have to thin them if they are are too clumped together. Whereas if you transplant like if you transplant the chives or or if you transplant the cucumbers, you have one plant where you plant it at. So you don’t have to do the thinning. So that’s the advantage of transplanting. But um whatever is suitable for you, but for me as a gardener, I prefer to transplant. But it does add another step to the process. you do have to grow the transplant earlier, you know, and get it seated earlier, but um I think that having a transplant out there and ready to grow, um you get a little bit of a head start with it. So, somebody wants to know if it’s too soon to plant beets. No, perfect time to seed beets. Um yeah, this is beets are a great summer crop. Um yeah, go for it. We don’t have enough people uh having beets in their gardens. Um it’s almost, you know, we have gardeners in this state who grow beets year round. Um it’s a little bit of a an art to it, but um you you definitely can grow them in the summer months. And there are many varieties. We like red ace, which is our favorite variety, but you may also um have heard of variety that’s candy cane uh striped, which is called Kioia, which is an an heirloom variety. Very sweet. So, you could go to some of these seed cataloges, like what I was holding up, the Baker Creek seed catalog. They carry kio. Um, you can eat the greens off of it like you do Swiss chard, but you can also eat the um the stem, the swollen stem, which is the bead. And so, yeah, definitely grow grow your beets. Do you need to fertilize chops? Uh, I would put a light fertilizer on them. Um, so the fertilizer that you could use, it’s kind of an easy fertilizer is just something that’s uh water soluble like the Miracle Grow mix that you buy. Um, that would be a good general feeding program to water them, you know, once or twice a month with a um a Miracle Grow mix. um whatever the recommendation is, one or two tablespoons per gallon, and then that would be enough supplemental fertilizer um for the the chives. Um I also would recommend fertilizing the the cucumbers with with nitrogen, too. They like nitrogen. So, give them either some fertilizer um you know, as they grow. Um you know, when we do things in these pots like what we have here, sometimes I put in a slowrelease fertilizer like osmmaicode. So I I meant to bring bring my osmmaode bottle here, but I would put like a tablespoon in this mix here and then I would grow my lettuce just with a slowrelease fertilizer. So osmmaode or something that’s a slow release would be an option too, but um you will need to regularly feed um these these vegetables through the through the growing season. Are there any problems? Are there any problems that typically run into for cucumbers that folks just need to be on the lookout for problems uh with growing these crops. I think what would be on my um my radar for these crops of all three of them probably the cucumber beetle uh for the cucumbers um and um lettuce um I’m not sure you’ll see aphids on lettuce. You could um you know some other things that feed on lettuce which are you know like grasshoppers and things that but usually you don’t see that very often but cucumber beetles on cucumbers and even summer squash is can be devastating. So um make sure the first time you see um a a beetle that’s black and yellow either with spots on it or with stripes on it. They’re both they’re different species of cucumber beetles. Those need to be removed from the plant because they are feeding on the the the flowers. They’re feeding on the foliage. They’re actually feeding on the cucumber fruit when it har when it starts producing fruit. And then they transmit bacterial w which is a devastating disease that could just wipe out your plants. So the the the moment that you see a a yellow and black uh quarter inch long beetle uh definitely remove them from the plant and make sure that they’re not doing any damage. Okay. So, um it’s 25 after. I mean, uh you guys can certainly, you know, think of some questions and email me, uh later. Um I’m always happy to come back and do, you know, more tutorials on these crops, particularly when we harvest them and what they should look like when they’re about ready to be harvested. Um you also want to make sure you take the survey as part of this academy today. and then with the code word seeds seed ds on it. And um I en enjoy talking to gardeners all over the state. And um I just wish everyone a great gardening season. And like I said, just remember, try something new. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but at least you know you’ve done something you haven’t done before. And that’s what keeps gardening exciting, I think, is just finding out new things. And um you know, we’ll talk more about gardening through the through the season here, but um I wish everybody great success for the gardening year. Thank you.
1 Comment
In the calendar when it says just “seed xyz” and doesn’t specify indoor or outdoor , does it mean direct sowing?