Video: 5 tips for planting vegetables

In this video, we go over 5 useful tips for planting vegetables from transplant or seed:

1. Timing: cool vs warm season
2. Location: sun & soil
3. Selecting transplants
4. Planting
5. Watering

Our top tip for beginning vegetable gardeners is to spend some time planning when to plant what you want to grow so that your crops will thrive. In Utah and areas with similar intermountain semi-arid climates, seasons are very distinct: springs and falls are cool and variably wet and summers are hot and dry. Vegetable crops that prefer cool temperatures (peas, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, etc) fare much better in spring and fall in cool weather and warm season vegetables (tomato, pepper, squash, cucumber, etc) perform much better when planted after soil temperatures warm up or when using some sort of protection from cool-cold weather and to warm the soil. Because there is a tendency to want to plant everything all at the same time, sometimes cool season crops are planted too late and warm season crops too early.

After discussing timing in the video, we also demonstrate how to plant a vegetable transplant by planting a cucumber. Featured in the video are peas and broccoli as cool season crops that were planted in early spring and tomato, squash and cucumber as warm season crops planted in late spring. We also discuss planting warm season crops early with protection from variable weather using frost blankets and wall-o-water.

For more on timing plantings so that you can grow a cool season crop before a warm season crop to save space, check out our video on multi-cropping: https://youtu.be/dwWDLZW9e2c

For more detail on timing with suggested planting times for Utah, see https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2843&context=extension_curall

Read more about selecting a good location and preparing garden soil and using compost: https://foodscapingutah.org/2018/01/15/preparing-garden-beds-part-1-the-magic-of-compost/

Read keys to success when starting a foodscape: https://foodscapingutah.org/2018/01/15/getting-started-3-keys-to-success/