Warm, Spring Weather is Coming
Poppies in Snow
Snow today (March 7) — a perfect time to plant seeds outdoors. Yes, really!
Obviously, not just any seed can be sown in snow. The ground is still frozen solid so I can’t easily cover seeds with soil. And cold temperatures are going to rot most seeds before the weather warms enough for them to germinate and grow.
I’m planting poppy seeds. It does seem harsh to sow a flower whose seeds are hardly finer than dust and whose petals are as delicate as fairy shawls. But early sowing is a must, because poppy seedlings thrive during the cool, moist weather of early spring. Covering the seeds with soil? No problem: Poppy seeds sprout best left uncovered. And because poppies don’t transplant well, their seeds are best sown right where the flowers are going to grow.
I’ll be sowing annual poppies, whose petals and leaves are more delicate than those of Oriental poppies. Corn poppy (Papaver rhoeas) once dotted the grain fields of Europe with its blood red flowers.
Corn poppy
These flowers were immortalized in the poem Flander’s Fields, symbolizing lives lost in World War I. On Memorial and Veteran’s Day, red tissue-paper “corn poppies” are still distributed in memory of wars’ victims. Shirley poppy is a kind of corn poppy that has white lines along the edges of its petals. Corn and Shirley poppies begin blooming shortly after spring-flowering bulbs have finished their show, and continue blooming through July.
California poppy (Eschscholtzis californica) was named in honor of Dr. Eschscholtz, a Russian ship surgeon who found these bright orange flowers blanketing California hillsides. California poppy is a perennial but in our harsh winters must me treated like an annual and sown yearly.
Each winter, it doesn’t seem possible that the dust-like seeds I sprinkle atop the ground’s chilly, white blanket could ever amount to anything. Each spring, I’m amazed to see myriad of ferny poppy leaves, then flowers.
Warmer Spring in Greenhouse
The sun is getting brighter in the sky day by day so it’s mostly lack of heat that’s holding back plant growth. Outdoors, there’s not much to do about a lack of heat. In the greenhouse, it’s time to turn up the thermostat a bit.
Thus far, I’ve let greenhouse temperatures drop no lower than about 38 degrees F. During bright, sunny days, of course, temperatures push up into the 80s. 
An exhaust fan keeps temperatures from getting too high, which, with lows in the 30s, would wreak havoc with plant growth, at the very least causing lettuce, mustard, and arugula to go to seed and lose quality too soon.
Adding just a few degrees at the bottom end of the temperature scale will spur growth in the newly sprouting lettuce, arugula, onion, and leek seedlings. This new minimum temperature of 43 degrees Fahrenheit strikes a congenial balance between plant growth and the cost and conservation of energy, propane in this case.
Bottom Heat for Seedlings
I’m not skimping on heat when it comes to germinating seeds. Seeds require more heat to sprout than seedlings need to grow. Too little heat and seeds either rot or sprout too slowly.
Fortunately, seeds need little or, in some cases, no light to sprout. Some people use the warmth atop their refrigerator for seed germination; the top of my refrigerator isn’t warm at all. Some people germinate their seeds at a warm spot in their house, such as near a heating duct; my home, heated mostly with wood, has no such oases. The temperatures near the wood stove swing over too wide a temperature range for good germination.
Years ago I invested in a thermostatically controlled heating mat, made especially for gardening. The mat is in the greenhouse, so even if greenhouse temperatures drop to 43 degrees F., my seed flats sit with their bottoms soaking up 75 degree warmth from the mat below.
That’s how much warmth is needed to get the pepper and eggplant seeds I sowed this week to sprout.
New Book by Lee!
A Book Is Born
Finally, after all the hard work, I have in hand the first copies of my new book The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden. 
This book grew out of my long love affair with gardening—such a congenial confluence of colors, flavors, and aromas all seasoned with the weather, whatever pests happen to stop by that year—and the science behind it all!
And the science behind it all is what this book is about. No, it’s not a comprehensive overview of botany and related sciences. It is some of the natural science that can be applied in the garden. Science may seem out of place in so bucolic an activity as gardening. After millions of years of evolution, seeds want to sprout, and plants want to grow, even in such diverse soils and climates as the Arctic tundra, the Arizona desert, and my garden in New York’s Hudson Valley. So it’s possible to have a decent garden with minimal effort or know-how.
But with some understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes, and application of that understanding, gardening can be something more than this business as usual, with commensurately more rewards.
In The Beginning . . .
The beginnings for this book came to me one day as I was piling recently scythed hay and horse manure, along with old vegetable plants and sprinklings of soil and dolomitic limestone, into one of my compost bins. I realized that what I was adding to the pile and how much of each ingredient, even how I fluffed them up or patted them down with my pitchfork, and then watered, all reflected what I had learned over decades of gardening. My classrooms have included actual classrooms; gleanings from magazines, books, and scientific journals; conversations with other gardeners and agricultural scientists; and (most importantly) the garden itself.
My garden education has been unusual. Growing up in the suburbs, the tenure of our family’s small vegetable garden was soon eclipsed by a swing set.
Wait! How about that potted banana tree and one hyacinth bulb that I nurtured under the purple glow of a Growlite in the basement during high school? Or the potted cactus that I bought to adorn my bedroom windowsill in graduate school. Hints of future interest? Perhaps.
Graduate study in those cactus days was in chemistry, a continuation of an interest kindled by my high school chemistry teacher. But coming to the conclusion that graduate study in quantum chemistry was not going to answer any fundamental questions, I dropped out, moved to Vermont, and got the gardening bug. Because I was living in a third floor apartment, I expressed that gardening bug with a voracious appetite for books—books about gardening.
A year later, I dove into agriculture in earnest, and was fortunate to land in a graduate program in soil science. My interest and education in chemistry proved a good foundation for soil science.
A small plot of land began my education “in the field” and complemented my academic studies. 
The university’s agricultural library offered more books to further round out my education. (I remember coming across a whole book on lettuce seed!)
Eight years later, with two framed diplomas to hang on my wall, one for a master’s degree in soil science, and the other for a doctorate degree in horticulture, I was still gardening with the same exuberance and learning about gardening through experience, the printed word, and contact with others “in the know.” Thinking back, how little I knew about gardening. And so it goes.
A Little Natural Science for a Lot Better Garden
Back to my compost pile… I took into account the meadow hay’s youthful lushness, which influences its ratio of carbon to nitrogen, as I layered it into the bin along with the horse manure. Manure is usually thought of as a high nitrogen material, but I looked at what was in the cart and, eyeing the amount and kind of bedding (wood shavings) with which it was mixed, made a rough estimate in my head of how much to use to make a good balance with the meadow plants. When the pile was finished, I checked my work by monitoring the temperature of the pile’s interior with a long-stemmed compost thermometer. Etc., etc. There’s art in making compost. But also science.
With this book, I hope to show how knowing and using a little of the natural science behind what’s happening out in the garden can make for a lot better garden in terms of productivity, beauty, plant health, sustainability… and interest. Knowing some of the underlying science at work in the garden also makes for a more resilient gardener, better able to garden at a new location or in a changing environment.
The Ever Curious Gardener is available in bookstores and online in mid-April, 2018, or now, signed from me, at https://leereich.com/books/the-ever-curious-gardener-using-a-little-natural-science-for-a-much-better-garden.
