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Gardening with Allen: Use seed maturity time as guide

By Allen Wilson
Published: February 25, 2023, 6:03am

Could you help me choose some vegetable varieties that will grow well here, especially tomatoes?

Although we have a long growing season here, cool night temperatures slow development of some vegetables so they take longer to mature. It helps to plant some early or rapidly maturing vegetable varieties.

Most seed packets, catalogs and seed sources online rate vegetable varieties by days to maturity. Many vegetable plant tags also include this rating, which is the number of days from planting to first harvest under ideal growing conditions. Ratings for hardy or cold tolerant vegetables fit our climate fairly well. These include almost all of the root, leaf and flower-bud vegetables, plus peas. Frost-tender or heat-tolerant vegetables need to have about two weeks added to the days-to-maturity ratings. In cooler, high-elevation areas, even more time must be added. Tender vegetables include almost all the fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, corn, squash, cucumbers, melons and beans.

Almost all the hardy vegetable varieties will mature in our growing season. However, earlier varieties may give us an advantage, especially in colder areas. Because hardy varieties are more tolerant of light frost, they can be planted as much as a month ahead of the average last frost date, which is mid-April in Vancouver. It is best to wait until temperatures warm up in May to plant tender vegetables.

Tomato varieties are the most critical. An 80-day tomato will take about 94 days from transplanting to the first ripe fruit in Vancouver. If planted at the normal time in mid-May, the first fruit will be harvested about the middle of August. It is obvious that a 60 day tomato would bear fruit about 3 weeks earlier and increase the length of harvest period.

There are several ways to speed up the maturing process. One way is to plant larger 4-inch or gallon-size plants. Another is to use black or colored plastic mulch, which warms the soil and speeds growth. Plastic tunnels, floating row covers and Wall-O-Water protectors all increase the air temperature around plants and speed growth. Earlier planting without these growing aids seldom shortens the time to maturity, because temperatures are too low for stimulating growth of tender varieties.

Another way to use days-to-maturity ratings is to plant two or more varieties with different maturity ratings to spread the harvest period. This works well for sweet corn, onions, tomatoes and cabbage. An early 60- to 65-day cabbage will be mostly harvested by the time a later 80-day cabbage is ready. I like to plant three maturities of sweet corn, with ratings about 10 days apart. Since sweet corn is a little more frost tolerant than other tender vegetables, I plant corn in late April. Some of the later-ripening tomatoes are larger and have better flavor than the earliest varieties, so I plant both.

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