By DIANE RELF

By DIANE RELF

Extension Home Horticulturist

If you’re like most gardeners, the pleasure of the seed catalogs is wearing thin about this time of year. Your fingers are starting to itch for the feel of the earth.

Well, you’ve waited long enough. At last, it s time to start planting early vegetables.

You can sow the hardy types about a month before the average last frost date in your area. That’s right about now for much of Virginia. Call your local Extension office to get the date for your part of theCommonwealth.

To promote vigorous growth, apply a liberal amount of 5-10-5 fertilizer when you plow or turn your garden. Broadcast about four pounds per 100 square feet and disc it into the top five inches of soil before planting.

To use fertilizer more efficiently and reduce the chances of nutrient leaching and water pollution, band the fertilizer two to three inches beneath the seed row's — about two pounds per 100 feet of row.

Don’t cover seeds too deeply. This early in the season the soil is still cool and moist, and the seeds need only a light covering. A depth of two or three times their longest dimension is plenty.

Lettuce is one of the best early season crops. Salad Bowl is a good variety. It is a leaf lettuce that grows well in Virginia, even after warmer weather approaches. Great Lakes is well suited to areas of the Commonwealth w here spring is long and cool. It is a solid, crisp-head type. In most of Virginia, however, the weather gets too hot too soon to produce good yields of the solid, crisp-head varieties.

Instead, if you live in the warmer regions, try a few plants of ButterCrunch. This is an All-America Selection of Bibb lettuce. It has thick, tender, delicious leaves in a loose head.

The Cos- or Romaine-type lettuce varieties are quite tolerant of heat and produce well-shaped, elongated heads.

Include a few radishes in your early garden, but not too many. They’ll come up and be ready to eat

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