Succession Planting is Key

So looking outside today, it's 37 degrees and my Victory Garden 4'x8' bed of perfect soil is looking...grey.

I have done nothing to prepare for this season, which is, apparently, upon us.

So today I called up Gretchen Mead, local expert and executive director of Victory Garden Initiative, to see what I should do to get in gear.

She's used to this, apparently, and will come to your garden for one or two hours, and help you draw up a full plan for creating a mini-ecosystem or guild (a unit in a food forest, like fruit trees, that include varied plantings that help avoid the need for chemicals). She helps you weave edibles between your foliage, called "inter-planting."

Or you can do what I did last year, and order a 4-foot-by 8-foot garden bed full of perfect soil to be constructed wherever you would like it on your property.

They are available again this year from May 20 through 26, as Victory Garden Blitz 2012 will be a week long, and for a $150 you can have a gaggle of volunteers come to your yard, build a garden bed, fill it up and wish you well.

So I have a perfect garden, from which I managed to generate vegetables last year...but it was clear I only paid attention to the going-in stage, and not the I'm-done-now-please-take-me-out part. Now to do it better this year. Thanks to a quick primer from Mead that will help you, too, here's what to do pronto, if you haven't started yet:

— Make a mess! Stir up the soil, weed, remove those toys and bits of rope.

— Start warm crops from seed at home. Kids can help; use recycled containers like yogurt, poke holes in the bottom, put them on a tray of some kind, and get those tomatoes, peppers and eggplant into soil. Techically, it's too late to start things from seed, it's better now than never. Get them going.

— Put cold crop seeds in now (they can withstand a frost): kale, lettuce, spinach, onions, beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, peas and beans. Mead recommends the Seed Saver's Exchange, often found at Outpost, for good seeds that are non-GMO. (something else new - even if you are an organic gardener, your seeds may have been genetically altered.

— Don't plant all your seeds at once. (Oops - just one of my problems last year). Leave some rows or sections open for mid-season, next-generations of peas, for example. Kale can be harvested year round, and some kinds of broccoli as well.

Or, for vegetables that have different harvest times, "Plant an alternating row of carrots and radishes because radishes will be fast," Mead explained.

"It's all about succession planting and plant lifecycle," said Mead, who offers a class on this, which helps understand which crops you'll harvest and re-seed, like peas, which can have multiple "generations" within a summer in Milwaukee.

Still hesitating? Mead suggests that time is of the essence. And, if the weather should turn drastically cold, Mead suggests one more supply: a "floating row cover," that looks like a big dryer sheet, available in gardening catalogs and online.