Direct Sowing Cool Season Crops This April

I spent two full growing seasons starting lettuce and spinach indoors under grow lights, babying them through transplant shock, and then watching them sulk in the ground for two weeks anyway. Turns out cool season crops basically laugh at you when you do that. They want to be direct sown. They prefer the cold, wet, slightly miserable April soil we’ve got right here in Redmond.

So if you’ve been hardening off little trays of spinach seedlings, I’m not judging. I did it too. But you can stop.

Why April Is Actually Perfect

Cool season crops germinate well in soil temps around 45-65 degrees, and right now our soil is sitting right in that window. We’re still getting rain every other day (shocker), which means you probably won’t even need to water much after sowing. Direct sowing cool season crops in April in the PNW is about as close to free gardening as you can get. Seeds go in, sky waters them. That’s the whole system.

What to Direct Sow Right Now

Peas

Peas are probably the most forgiving thing you can grow from seed and they genuinely do not want to be transplanted. Direct sow them about an inch deep, two inches apart, in a single or double row along whatever trellis you’ve got. I use a five-foot section of old wire fencing zip-tied to two wooden stakes. Glamorous it is not. Functional it is.

Snap, shelling, snow, doesn’t matter much for timing. Get them in the ground before it warms up and you’re fine. Peas start to struggle once temps hit the mid-70s, so April really is the window here.

Lettuce

I planted all my lettuce at once for three years before I figured out what succession planting was. What you get with that approach is about ten days of more salad than your family can eat, followed by a pile of bolted bitterness and a lot of regret. Lettuce, let us not do that again.

Direct sow a short row now, another in two weeks, another in two more weeks. Scatter the seeds thinly, barely cover them (they need light to germinate), and thin to six inches once they’re up. The thinnings are edible. Nothing wasted.

Spinach

Spinach wants cold even more than lettuce does. Sow it about half an inch deep, an inch apart, and thin to three or four inches. It bolts fast once the days get long, so I plant it dense and harvest young. Baby spinach takes about 25-30 days and you don’t have to fuss with it much before that.

One thing I got wrong early on: I kept planting spinach in the same spot. Doesn’t love that. Rotate it around if you can, or at least work some blood meal into the soil beforehand. Nitrogen deficiency makes spinach look sad and yellow and also, honestly, like it reflects my own energy in March.

Radishes

Radishes are the instant gratification crop of the cool season garden. Twenty-five days to harvest if conditions are right. My daughters love pulling them out of the ground. They do not love eating them, but that’s fine, I do.

Sow them half an inch deep, one inch apart, thin to two inches. Don’t skip the thinning or you’ll get all tops and no radish. And don’t let them sit in the ground too long once they’re ready. Woody and spicy-weird is the result, and not in a good way.

The Setup (Which Costs Almost Nothing)

You don’t need fancy raised beds or special soil amendments for any of these. A patch of ground that drains reasonably well, some cheap seed packets from Sky Nursery or a seed catalog, and a stick to draw furrows. That’s it. I’ve been using the same $1.49 packets of mixed lettuce from Territorial Seed for years. Seeds don’t need to be fancy.

If slugs are a problem (and in the PNW they absolutely are), scatter some iron phosphate bait around your seedlings once they come up. The organic kind runs about $7.99 at Swansons and it’s safe around kids and pets. I learned this after losing an entire row of spinach to slugs in year two and standing there staring at the mud like it owed me an explanation.

One More Thing

Label your rows. I know that sounds obvious. I stop doing it every single spring and then stand over unlabeled seedlings trying to remember if that’s the spinach or the lettuce. Which, now that I think about it, has happened four years in a row so maybe I’m the problem. Anyway. Direct sowing cool season crops is fast and low-effort, which means there’s really no excuse not to do it now. The soil is ready. April is basically begging you.

Get out there. The rain will hold for at least forty-five minutes, probably.

Photo by Compagnons on Unsplash