10 Easy Seeds to Direct Sow in April with Pisa! Community Q & Q

There’s always so much more to share!

Here’s a little something we made you and if you’d love the full season of Plant Now! charts, you’ll find them in our free Growing Library ~

What seeds are we sowing, once the soil drains a bit more?

Peas

As a child, peas were the first seeds I sowed. They are large enough for fingers learning to be dexterous and they are not persnickety when it comes to being sown too shallow or too deep. Many thanks to all the people in our world sowing seeds with children!

We share snap and snow as well as shelling varieties of peas. You’ll find massive and abundant full-size plants as well as prolific compact plants that don’t require trellising. We often sow both full-size and dwarf varieties on the same day once the snows melt so we can enjoy twice the harvest window. Soak them overnight prior to planting for quicker emergence! Here in Zone 5 at Fruition, we sow two successions in spring and a third in early August for an abundant fall harvest. Find all these details & more in our Pea Growing Guide, part of Fruition’s free Growing Library.

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Spinach

So cold-hardy and so succulent, we cannot imagine life without spinach. Fruition shares organic seeds impressively adapted to our short seasons, often overwintering uncovered in our fields here in Zone 5. Classic spinach germinates best and remains delicious longest in the cool soils of spring and fall. Remarkably similar in both texture and flavor, tatsoi (‘Asian spinach’) thrives in warm as well as cool soils, perfect for sowing anytime from snowmelt in spring through September here in Zone 5.

Radish

So easy to grow, we love the vivid colors of freshly harvested radishes as succulent additions to salads and sandwiches. We also love radishes roasted, grilled and pickled, even in kimchi! Sow salad radishes anytime from snowmelt through September in Zone 5. There’s always an exception, right? Sow watermelon radishes in late July/early August for a fabulous fall harvest rather than spring: With twice the days to harvest, they are most abundant & delicious when maturing into the cool of autumn.

Calendula

Edible, medicinal & beautiful! Calendula is easy to grow and remarkably drought tolerant, perfect for containers and companion planting, though be forewarned: she will readily naturalize and become a calendula carpet when her flowers go to seed. Calendula thrives whether she is direct sown or transplanted from early spring through late summer, since calendula is impressively cold-tolerant.

Our Favorite Cold-Hardy Greens

There are so many cold-hardy greens, Friends! And we’re regionally adapting them to be even more deliciously resilient. In addition to spinach & tatsoi, here are just a few: arugula, winter green mesclun mix (above), kale, shanghai greens baby pac choi, winter density lettuce, napa cabbage, broccoli, rapini & endive.

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Direct sow or transplant? So much depends! You’ll find our

Direct Sow & Transplanting Chart

in both our Across the Seasons Perpetual Calendar as well as our 40-page seed starting book, Rise & Shine: Starting Seeds with Ease. Enjoy ourfree ebook perfect for home printing here & if you’d love the gorgeously colorful, spiral-bound paper copy (they’re gorgeous!) scoop yours up here 🧡