17 Garden Plants to Direct Sow in February & March: My Secret for Speeding up Germination!

Welcome to the Rusted Garden Homestead. It is time to start your 2024 garden. It's February. I want to go over 15 plants you can direct sow into your garden now. I'm in Maryland Zone 7. You can see that it was snowing. These are cool weather crops. They can take a frost. They can take a freeze. But they do beautifully in the cold. The key is when the ground, you know, is starting to warm up in February, sometimes it's still a bit too cold. The seeds take a long time to germinate. So we'll go over the 15 plants and I'll give you a little trick that you can do to help warm the soil up and get that germination started a little bit more quickly. So we're going to go over examples in my garden. These plants have been growing since last year and if they're growing now they can certainly be direct sown and put into your garden. Right back there those are radishes and then we have kale. Mustard greens are fast growers. They love the cold. They germinate really quickly. You can see it start mustard greens. We have more radishes along there. Pak choy, bok choy, Chinese cabbage is wonderful to start in February. Carrots right down there. And you're just going to follow the seed packages on your planting instructions. The trick is going to be putting down a piece of plastic over there. So I'll show you how I do that. More radishes. These plants again can take the frost and the freeze. The whole trick is warming up the soil in some way so they germinate more quickly. And just keep in mind all the plants that you're seeing they were planted back in October. So they've survived through December and January here in Maryland. They've taken that freeze. They've taken the frost. We have lettuce. That's a red romaine. Peas are still up and going. And here's the polycarbonate that I'll be showing at the end of the video. That's spinach in there. By protecting the spinach here just with this dome it's kept a microclimate in there which has kept warmth in there and the spinach is really ready to harvest. I've been picking that over the last week. This is arugula that seeded itself back in November. Made it through the winter so far. These are purple top turnips. Perfect to get into the ground in February. These actually went in in September. So it's been about four or five months that they've handled the winter here in Maryland. And you can see some of the turnips are ready. We also have bunching onions or green onions. They can go into the ground now. Another February crop for direct sowing is swiss chard. It grows all season long here in Maryland. Just FYI, that's garlic coming up around it. If the plants can look this good through the winter here in Maryland, they're perfect to plant now in February. These are collard greens. Same family as kale. Collard greens, kale. Perfect cool weather crops to get into the ground early for your gardening season in 2024. Other seeds you can direct sow kohlrabi, endive, parsnips. There's so much you can get into the garden in February. Don't need to pay mind to the freezes and frosts. Let me show you the trick that I was talking about. And beets round off, I think, for 15. These are the 15 crops that you can plant in February here in Maryland zone 7. Now let's go over the trick to warm up the soil. Again, just starting from the beginning, these plants can take the cold. They can take a frost. They can take a freeze. They're going to germinate much more slowly when the ground is still in the 30s and the 40s. So this is polycarbonate. You can use any piece of plastic. It can even be soft plastic like greenhouse plastic. I like using the polycarbonate. I will link the video that actually shows you how to create this build if you're interested. I did this video maybe three or four years ago. But the polycarbonate is just a clear piece of plastic. It's ribbed along the edges. That's nice because it's going to be propped up off the ground a little bit. That will let your seeds germinate into it. If you're using a flat piece of plastic, you want to put down some bricks or some branches or anything that the plastic can rest on so that when the seeds germinate from the soil, they're not pressing up against the plastic. This also will not burn your plants in February. It's cold enough even on a direct sunny day. The sun's just going to go through here. It's going to heat up a couple inches of soil, keep it warmer, speed up germination. But it's not going to be strong enough to damage your seedlings. After everything is germinated and it's up, you can go ahead and take this off. Let me show you an example of how I would use this. Before we finish up, please take a second and subscribe. I have over 1,700 videos on vegetable gardening. I'll teach you how to plant this entire garden in 2024, take care of pests, disease, the whole nine yards, teach you how to grow food, and have some fun. As soon as the soil has thawed so that you can work the top inch or so, you can go ahead and direct sow. Just follow the instructions on the seed pack. You know, plant them as you wish. I have plenty videos on how you start most of these outdoors if you want to look them up by name. But for this process, you're just going to clear out the space, maybe do a little better weeding than I have here, and you would just drop the seeds down. So I would do, for instance, the carrots about every inch or two right down the row. I'd put some radishes in there, maybe some spinach or something like that, within the rectangle of the plastic sheet that's going to go over it. That plastic sheet, let me get it off the end down there, would just cover over where the seeds are. I like putting it right onto the edge of my raised bed. I would drop something else down there, maybe across the middle, that will keep this raised up a little bit. Weight it down, the wind will blow this off. Just leave it on here. Oh, and before you put down the plastic, soak everything down nicely. You don't have to keep watering because it's cool out. The moisture will stay under the plastic because it's not going to evaporate up. Your seedlings will germinate much more quickly, and this is how you can get your garden going in February, just by doing, you know, a basic trick using plastic like this. And again, I want to stress one more time, polycarbonate, this piece, is kind of expensive now. If you get plastic, just make sure that it has UV protection so that the sun doesn't degrade it and it doesn't break. You could also just lay plastic across here, painter's tarp, greenhouse plastic, that will work also. I just like using this because it's much easier to store, to be honest with you. I can reuse it every year and it has multiple purposes. Thanks so much for watching. Please subscribe. I'll teach you how to grow food, have fun in the garden, and please check out my seed shop at therustedgarden.com. Get some of these seeds out early, you'll be rewarded, and experiment. You know, maybe everything doesn't germinate perfectly. Figure out of those 15 seeds which ones you can plant early every year in your garden, and you'll get produce and production and have more fun earlier in the season. Thanks for watching.