Vegetables for Late Winter, Early Spring Planting Without a Greenhouse

Collards, red cabbage and Walla Walla
onion transplants just after planting
in one of my raised beds.

Cauliflower, Chinese cabbage,
and broccoli transplants.

Here in the High Desert of SoCal, it is time to start planting a few vegetables directly into the garden – without the use of a greenhouse. Since a couple of my raised beds were ready,  I started planting last weekend, and despite a couple nights of frost, the plants are doing well and have even grown. What kinds of veggies can handle the cooler temperatures found in this climate, you might ask?

Many types of greens do wonderfully in the cooler temps – lettuce, cabbage, collards, kale, arugula, spinach – plus broccoli, cauliflower, onions, carrots and more. I don’t think they would do really well if the temperatures went down to the mid- to low-twenties, but they seem to do exceptionally well in the upper twenties and above.

I went to our local Lowes and Home Depot stores to see what they had available and found a decent assortment of greens and other plants to choose from. Although I plan to grow many of them from seed, I thought it might be nice to get a head start with a few pony-packs of transplants. Keep in mind that just because the store is offering them for sale does not necessarily mean that it is time for planting – they had many tomatoes and peppers for sale even though the time for planting them outdoors is not until mid- to late-April in this area. My choices included collard greens, red cabbage, dinosaur kale, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, cauliflower, red leaf lettuce, and Walla Walla onion sets. I find it amusing that I am actually growing collards – up until I created a delicious soup that included collards as one of the ingredients (see previous post), my husband totally HATED them.

I also planted a few seeds last week, which included some sugar snap peas, cilantro, purple carrots, arugula and red Romaine lettuce. None have germinated yet – those results will be mentioned in an upcoming post. I planted similar seeds at the same time last year and they all grew nicely. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be sowing more seeds – more carrots and lettuce, spinach, radishes, assorted beets and maybe some parsnips.

Inside, I am experimenting with growing some of my own transplants, which I always do for warm-season crops such as tomatoes and peppers, but have not done for the cool-season crops. These “experiments” include Swiss chard, kale, and bok choi. All have begun sprouting and I hope to plant them outdoors in a couple weeks.