By Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and the author of The Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast and Grow Great Vegetables in Virginia
Finish planning your garden and start planting in flats. By late February make sure you have all your seeds ordered and ready to start including extra for late summer and fall succession plantings. Remember “summer planting for your fall harvest”. Indoors or in a cold frame, start some lettuce, parsley, early cabbage, broccoli, and finish sowing any remaining bulb onions from seed or hot peppers like Habanero because they are very slow to grow early on. If you are feeling adventurous, mid month you can start sweet peppers and eggplants. Start more broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, Chinese greens, and lettuce in flats. Later in the month start your first tomato seedlings. You may want to start a cold tolerant Russian variety or an extra early variety like Glacier or Stupice.
We like pre-sprouting spinach, peas, and beet seeds on paper towels in an incubator or in a mason jar in a warm place indoors for an extra early start in the spring. These can be planted out every two weeks. Plant them out under row cover as soon as they send out their 1st little roots. Incubators or heating mats speed up germination and get your early seedling flats off to a flying start. When the weather warms up switch to direct sowing these seeds.
In a cold frame under a garden blanket, you can start some Globe Artichokes or rhubarb. Plants that see temperatures between 35 and 42 when young will often produce well in early summer the same year. Start cool weather greens like spinach, Bok Choi, Lettuce, Mizuna, Mustard and early lettuce varieties. I am lucky to have a greenhouse for my early planting madness. If you don’t have a greenhouse I suggest growing your earliest seedling under florescent lights. Hang the lights on chains so you can move the lights up as the seedlings grow. Keep your lights just a few inches above the plants for sturdy little seedlings.
While the weather is still nice enough to enjoy being outside finish weeding your perennials and give them compost, if not done in fall, including strawberries and grapes. February is the month to transplant any remaining bushes, canes, or crowns. Mulch everything. Prune grapes, finish pruning blueberries and raspberries.
As February turn into March get ready for spring planting in earnest!
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