Print edition: 
Spring begins. The two words on my calendar today provide hope, although the forecast for snow sets me back two steps.
There is a little cactus in a western window of my house that turns into a pale green knob every winter. I get blue and ready to give up on it, and then, each late winter, responding to forces in nature that I can't sense yet, it sprouts a few little fresh green leaves. Noticing them last weekend, I toasted the whole sandy cactus collection with fertilizer-spiked water. (They drank, not I.) If they're ready to grow, I figure, it's time to encourage them.
Here's another sign of hope: We'll start a new feature next week about the master gardeners' demonstration garden. The master gardeners have already started some seeds indoors, but in a few days, assuming the weather allows, they'll plant their first seeds — radish and lettuce — outside. Each week we'll peek into the garden to see how it's growing, what pests and diseases manifest themselves, when vegetables are ready to harvest and what ways some of the food can be used.
Here's a rundown of what the master gardeners are planning to plant this year. Let it inspire you to follow along, maybe comparing your efforts with theirs as we go along. As extension agent Rebecca McMahon joked: We could have a contest to see whose squash gets killed by vine borers first!
Family of Four Garden
This is the garden we followed last year in the Gardener's Almanac, and it's a fairly basic garden, planted in amounts that would feed a family of four a moderate amount of a variety of vegetables.
In the garden this year will be:
* Three tomato plants: an early variety, a slicing and a cherry.
* Eight peppers: a couple of bells, a jalapeno, a banana, a chile, an Italian grilling pepper like Marconi, and a Yummy snack pepper. I've never seen them, but Rebecca says you can occasionally find snack peppers in clamshell packages at the grocery store. Yummy is a small sweet pepper that is orange and mostly seedless.
* Two zucchini
* Two bush-type acorn squash
* One cucumber
* Four herbs: parsley, basil, chives and oregano
* In the spring, beets, carrots, radishes, spinach, salad-mix lettuce, onions, green onions and Swiss chard. ("They voluntarily planted it!" Rebecca exclaims about the Swiss chard. The crop came in well and long last year, and it was a challenge to find ways to eat it.)
The green onions will simply be onion sets that are harvested at the green onion/scallion stage rather than when they're mature. The master gardeners will grow their large onions from transplants, probably Texas 1015.
* In the summer the gardeners will be rotating heat-resistant types of lettuce. The most basic of these is black-seeded Simpson, a green leaf lettuce with good resistance to heat. "Keep it rotating so it's not bitter," Rebecca says. Plant every two to three weeks to keep a steady supply. "We've gotta have some for the BLTs," Rebecca says. "Too bad we don't have a bacon plant." Let's hope someone's working on that.
* The fall will bring fresh plantings of spinach, lettuce, carrots, beets, green onions, fall daikon-type radishes, Swiss chard and turnips.
"As the tomatoes, peppers, squash and so on die, we may plant some other vegetables in those spots as well," Rebecca says.
Asian garden
"Our Asian garden is more out there," Rebecca says. Many of the plants will be grown from seed bought from an Asian-seed company (Kitazawa Seed Co. and EvergreenSeeds are a couple that you can find online.)
* Two types of yardlong beans on a trellis
* Watercress underneath the trellis
* Thai eggplant
* Eight varieties of Japanese peppers
* Two herbs: Thai basil and lemongrass
* A whole host of leafy greens: mizzuna, Chinese cabbage, bok choy, broccoli raab (a stemmy broccoli whose Asian name is hon tsai tai), leaf radish (harvested for its leaves rather than for its roots), three types of mustards and komatsuna (also called spinach mustard).
* And more watercress. "We're not sure it likes heat, so we're giving it a couple different opportunities to die," Rebecca says.
* The above are mainly spring vegetables, so when they're done, maybe the end of May, Japanese cucumbers and amaranth will be planted. The master gardeners also will try to cycle mizzuna in the summer so it doesn't bolt.
* For fall, fresh crops of bok choy, cabbage and greens will be planted, along with small turnips that can be eaten raw, red Asian carrots and more daikon radishes.
Compact beans and vines
One bed will alternate compact bean plants and compact vines. The beans will be planted going the short way across the bed at four different points, leaving four spots for the compact vines to grow in between.
* The beans: purple snap, yellow snap (aka wax), Italian flat (aka Romano) and a few lima beans.
* Compact acorn squash and compact gold zucchini.
* Sugar Baby bush watermelon and Honey Bun cantaloupe.
"I'm going to be really interested in those two melons to see how they produce and if they're tasty," Rebecca says.
Tomato garden
The tomatoes will be grown this year in the wheelchair bed, and, to make it accessible to people who would use a wheelchair bed, the tomatoes will be grown in 3-foot-high cages. That means the vines will either cascade over the cages or get whacked back, Rebecca says.
There will be five determinate vines, one tomatillo, and four indeterminate vines.
* An early-blight-resistant tomato
* An heirloom Brandywine and a hybrid Brandymaster
* Two heat-set varieties. "Maybe we will pay attention to if they really do set more when it's hot," Rebecca says.
* A sweet seedless.
The tomato seeds were started indoors this week and will tentatively be planted May 4. That date could move forward or backward according to the weather. I'm hoping they have to be planted earlier because the weather is so nice and warm.
The garden is at the Extension Education Center at 21st and Ridge Road. In addition to reading about the garden in the Home & Garden section, you can see it in person anytime, along with trees, roses and other plantings on the grounds.
