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Once a garden plan has been prepared, the next consideration in good vegetable gardening is to select the best possible varieties of vegetables to be grown and to order the seeds. Since no one seed company has a monopoly on all the best varieties, it is a good idea to pick up several catalogs.

Last year we bought seeds from five suppliers and this year we will be ordering from six or seven to get all the varieties we want. Avoid varieties which are described as being good for shipping, for “keeping” (except a few like onions and winter squash) or for storage. Those are qualities important to commercial growers but definitely not to home gardeners. You want the varieties to be succulent and flavorful and resistant to plant diseases.

Keep trying new varieties on a small scale until you find the ones that do best for you. In the beginning, at least, you can rely on the recommendations set forth in that bulletin you picked up from your state extension service. And you can get some help from neighbors who have good gardens as long as you bear in mind that a variety that grows and yields well in the garden of a friend on the other side of town may not measure up in your particular combination of soil and exposure. In the long run you must make your own choices on a basis of trial and error. Once you find a satisfactory variety for your garden, be reluctant to change for another until you have tried the new one out on a small scale for at least three years.

An Early Start

If you place your orders early, you will be sure to have the ones you have chosen from your gardening catalogs. This will avoid having substitutes for “sold-out” varieties and to receive the mail order gardening materials and seeds in ample time to start tomatoes, peppers and parsley indoors and lettuce, radish, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and cauliflower in a cold frame (if you are fortunate enough to have one).

We start tomatoes and peppers in pots indoors, transplant the seedlings into the cold frame for three or four weeks and finally move them out of pots into their final positions in the garden after all likelihood of frost has passed. Lacking a cold frame, the plants can be set directly into the garden 10 to 14 days earlier than would otherwise be advisable if they are covered by hot caps.

For protection from overnight destruction by the ubiquitous cutworms, wrap the stems of tomato and cabbage transplants with strips of newspaper about three inches wide when setting them in the garden. The paper should go about one inch into the ground and two inches above it. By the time the paper disintegrates, the stems will be too big and tough to interest cutworms. We treat pepper transplants the same way, but I must admit that I do not have the slightest idea whether it is necessary or not.

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