Guide to Cool Season Veggies at Painters Greenhouse

Like many gardeners in winter, we also daydream of various crops we’ll grow for the coming season. At Painters we spend the off-season researching vegetable varieties that perform well in our area. We gather feedback from customers and employees and research to find varieties bred to be adapted to the climate, soil, and pest/disease pressures of our area. To match our extensive research, we include detailed signage with information for each variety we offer (a big thanks to Nora for her hard work with that!).

This week we are highlighting cool-season veggies. When our doors opened the first week of March we made sure to have our whole selection of cool-season veggie starts available to customers. Many gardeners plant cool-season veggies before March, and that’s a good call! Our starts are mature enough to be transplanted directly into your garden - we've grown them to a healthy (and beautiful!) size. We try to select short-season or early maturing varieties of cool-season crops to help customers reap a bounty within the small window we have between now and summer. We also try to select varieties that can withstand warmer temperatures and are slow to bolt. All cool-season crops are grown in 3.5” pots, 18 pots to a flat, with pricing at $2 a pot and $32 a flat (mix-and-match!), and we often feature specials on veggies by the flat, so make sure to check out our New this Week page to view the latest price updates.

This year’s winter has felt more like spring, but don’t be fooled as we are still susceptible to frost ± 10 days from April 13th. This week is certainly showing us that the cold nights aren't gone yet! Check your average last (and first) frost days in your area here: https://products.climate.ncsu.edu/freeze/map.php. We plan to have our warm-season vegetable starts available for sale closer to mid-April, and at that point, we will highlight specific varieties of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, etc. we will have available.

Now onto the veggies!

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