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Soil Testing And Spring Planting Preparations

Pixabay

One of the things that would be important for people to do this time of year, particularly in southwest Utah, where I'm located, is to do some soil testing.

The reason I think a soil test is important this time of year, this would be particularly for people who have a brand new garden, or maybe they've moved to a new home or a location where they haven’t had a garden before, the soil test can tell them, given them basically kind of a bench line, of what their soil is like, maybe what it's lacking.

A salt test is an important one. And it can be very effective because so many of our soils down in this part of the state are high in salt, and that can be very restrictive as far as what you can grow.

Another thing that people probably would want to think about doing late February, early March would be putting down a pre-emergent herbicide. Pre-emergents are very effective against things like crabgrass, other annual grasses and certain prolific fleets that would come up to us too soon as the soil begins to warm.

So one more thing that we want to cover today would be what to plant in your garden coming up soon, because again, the Washington County area warms so quickly, we've already had days in the 60s.

It's not too early to plant some of what we call our cool season vegetables. These would be things like onions, peas, spinach, kale, chard, possibly even lettuce. And then our frost date would be April 1. So we would want to wait at least till April 1 to plant tender vegetables. These would be things like tomatoes and peppers.