Column by, David Graper, SDSU Extension Horticulture Specialist & Director of McCrory Gardens
•Lots of gardeners are anxious to get out and do some planting. Now is a good time to get started with some of those cool season loving plants like peas, lettuce and radishes that we can grow from seed. It is also a time when it is usually warm enough to transplant cabbage, broccoli cauliflower and related plants that can tolerate cool temperatures and even some light frost.
•Soil temperatures have remained

steady or dropped the last couple weeks which will delay seed germination and emergence so be careful with planting warmer season crops until the weather turns around and stays consistently warmer with night temperatures in the 40s or 50s.
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•Give dense planting a try
•Planting vegetable seeds is traditionally done in rows in the garden, usually spaced far enough apart to allow room for the rototiller to get down the rows without damaging the plants. But in many cases plants can grow much closer together, making more efficient use of garden space if you have a small garden plot.
•You will just have to do a lot more hand weeding instead of using a rototiller. On the other hand, if a space is filled with a vegetable plant, it is less likely to allow room for a weed to grow. Denser planting works especially well for low growing plants like lettuce, radishes, or carrots that grow well close to each other, do not get real bushy and are fairly easy to harvest. This close-spaced planting is also usually done in raised beds where you try to use every bit of that bed to produce food. You also make the bed narrow enough so that you can reach into the bed to tend or harvest the vegetables without actually stepping onto the soil in the bed. This is often referred to as square-foot gardening.
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•Keep those rows straight
•Most of the time, people will make rows in their gardens before planting their

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