A great way to celebrate Earth Day and reduce our overall carbon footprint is to start planning your vegetable garden now. Plants reduce carbon dioxide in the air, produce oxygen and help promote a healthy lifestyle.

Regardless of whether you plant vegetables in a backyard garden, maintain a patio herb collection or grow tomatoes in containers, you’ll be making strides toward a healthier planet and a healthier you. Plus, by growing your own vegetables you will always know what you are feeding your family. The produce you pick is packed full of nutrients because you have picked it at its prime. 

To that end, Hattie’s Garden will have a plant sale this Sunday, April 26 with some of the plants that are now ready. Because this is a “soft opening” and a small sale, we will hold the sale from just 3 to 5 on Sunday.

For those of you who have already purchased Plant CSA credits, you may come to the sale 30 minutes early to claim your most coveted varieties. But even if you come during the early part of the sale this week, we should have plenty of everything that is now ready.

If any of these times do not work for you, you can make arrangements with Hattie to come at a different time.

For this first sale, we will have our first batch of tomatoes, featuring most of the varieties on our website.

Yes, you may plant tomatoes now, but if the temperatures move into the low 40s at night, please protect them with something to reduce stress on them. You may cover them with just about anything, even a lawn chair or two with an old blanket or sheet will suffice to protect them from the worst of the wind and cold at night.

This is also a great time to plant lettuce and all of our featured lettuce plants are ready to be planted in your garden. Take a look at our collection.

Some of the eggplant plants are ready, but they would much prefer if you can wait a bit longer before setting them out. The squash and cucumbers will also like a bit more warmth and will be ready shortly, along with plenty of flowers.

Much of our pepper plants, and some of our herbs will also be available. In particular, the herbs include our cool weather herbs (herbs that are fine with cooler nights).

We have beautiful Bouquet Dill that can be grown for the “leaf” and also for the nice dill seed if you allow it to grow through its flowering stage. The pretty, delicate flowers are like Queen Anne’s Lace and are not only edible, but make nice additions as filler for other garden flowers, or on their own in a tall vase. I always leave some dill in the garden to flower and provide a home for beneficial insects in your garden.

We also have young cilantro plants and they will similarly flower for you and produce coriander seeds.

Yes, the seed of the cilantro plant is actually the coriander you may have bought as an herb. Edible at all stages, cilantro is also an excellent plant for providing a safe haven for beneficial insects. Cilantro does not like the heat of summer, so plant some now and then again in the waning days of summer.

As an aside, for a summer “cilantro,” this year we are trying Mexican Coriander, aka Culantro. With a strong flavor akin to cilantro, Culantro is native to South America and Mexico. Although grown and used throughout the world, it is little known in the United States. This “Mexican Coriander” will survive the hottest of summers and is a “tender” perennial, meaning it will not survive our winters, but must be planted each year anew. Our Mexican Coriander should be ready to plant as your regular Cilantro goes to flower.

Also ready are wonderful variegated Golden Lemon Thyme, our favorite Berggarten Sage with fatter, nicer leaves than regular sage, and beautiful tri-colored sage for a nice display in the garden.

The nights are colder than normal and according to NOAA, we will have a cooler than normal May and June. This gives everyone plenty of time to plant. We will be introducing more plants every week and will hold a plant sale every weekend in May at the garden.

Yours in the Garden,