GBH's Morning Edition asked our audience for weather and gardening questions, and meteorologist Dave Epstein graciously answered them on the air. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Have a gardening or weather question for meteorologist Dave Epstein? Tweet him
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What are you excited to plant in your garden this spring?
Epstein called in Thursday morning with a copy of Johnny's Selected Seeds catalogue by his side, and there are a few things he’s excited to get into his garden.
“There's a lot of new varieties of carrots and radishes,” he said. “You think about a radish, it's like, just red on the outside and white on the inside. But there's so many. They have different shapes now. Some are a little yellow inside, some are little pink inside. The carrots, it's the same thing.”
He's also excited about different heirloom varieties of carrots — grown with love and cooked with some butter and glazed with maple syrup.
“I think they do taste different, especially when you start getting into some of the heirloom seed, some of the older seeds that they're bringing back,” he said. “Some are a little more earthy, some are a little sweeter.”
What’s in the forecast for this spring?
Long-range forecasts don’t serve the same purpose as a consumer-facing weather report, Epstein said. It’s too soon to tell what the weather will be like on any particular day or week down the line this spring, but meteorologists can forecast some larger trends.
“That said, if you look at the long range 90-day forecast, which covers March, April and May, it overall looks warmer than average,” Epstein said. “No surprise, the climate is warming up.”
Last summer’s drought does not look like it will be returning to the region, at least not in the spring, he said.
“I'm pretty confident that we're not going to have the low amount of rain that we saw last year in spring and into the summer because the pattern has changed,” Epstein said. “We're out of the La Niña, now we're headed to an El Niño, actually. So I do think it's going to be wetter.”
That doesn’t mean non-stop rain is certain, he said — just that drought is less likely.
What are some tips for first-time gardeners thinking of taking it up this spring?
Make sure your plants have enough light, Epstein said.
“You really want to have absolute bare minimum of four hours,” he said. “You could get away if it was like 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., but you want as much sunshine as possible.”
Also key: high-quality soil, he said.
“The soil is the life of all these vegetables,” Epstein said. “If you're doing a container garden, you want to get container gardening soil for vegetables. It's organic. It doesn't have a lot of chemicals in it. If you're in the ground, I would say you want to add compost, which doesn't have to be expensive. You want to be sure that it's well-drained. And again, lots of sunshine.”
Some crop recommendations: Radishes are easy and satisfying, Epstein said. Lettuces, Asian greens like bok choi, and kale are also relatively easy, he said.
“Put a pot of tomatoes out,” he said. “Even if you don't have an in-ground garden, just a container with tomatoes. It can be a bucket, one of those big buckets that you get at one of the big box stores — as long as there's drainage.”
We have raspberry plants next to a deck made of pressure treated wood. Is it safe to eat the berries?
Epstein said raspberries grown next to a deck should be fine, but advised against planting crops inside a container made of pressure-treated wood.
“I wouldn't necessarily worry about that, that the deck is that close,” he said. “I wouldn't create a raised bed out of pressure treated wood because there is some thought that some of the chemicals may leach in. But I wouldn't worry about that with the raspberries.”
What are some places in the Boston area where people can go see beautiful flowers in bloom?
“One of the things that is great about the city is that there is a lot of outdoor space,” Epstein said. “I think just going down to the Boston Common and just walking around Boston seeing all those spring flowers is certainly easy to do.”
Epstein’s other favorites include: the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s Garden at Elm Bank , which opens April 1; Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, which has some beautiful flowering trees; the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, and the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston.
