Almost Planting Time

Now that my family’s vegetable garden is nearly on its way (I still have to add more soil), I’ve been thinking about what we want to plant this spring.

My daughters and I definitely would like to plant some peas. We got a bit of a late start last year (and didn’t plant until about May), so this year we will do it right and plant our peas around St. Patrick’s Day, the traditional pea planting time for much of the Mid-Atlantic states.

A sunflower that grew in my garden last summer.

We had some success with sunflowers in our garden last year, so this year we hope to plant sunflowers again, but BIGGER ones. So, I purchased a few packets of Sunflower Mammoth seeds, which, according to the packet, we can plant in April-June in our area. These sunflowers reportedly grow to as much as 12 feet tall.

But I might wait until May to plant them – according to Davesgarden.com, which offers a last frost date calculator by ZIP code, my best bet will be to wait until about May 8 to plant my sunflower seeds, as we could receive frost before then.

Another crop we’ll most likely plant are tomatoes, which growgardentomatoes.com says are best planted two weeks after the last frost date, so for my town in New Jersey, that would be May 22.

We’d like to plant some other crops, but are beginners, so we could use some tips on what would grow best in our New Jersey garden. Have suggestions? Please share them in the comments!