5 cool-weather veggies you can grow in your garden

Some like it hot, some like it cool and vegetables also notice when days get longer in spring and shorter in the fall. Here are a few vegetables that you can pop in the ground for an early harvest.

• For an early harvest, start beets in a cold frame in pots filled with a half-and-half mixture of potting soil and garden soil.
• Transplant to the garden as soon as all danger of frost is past, and keep the soil constantly moist.
• Direct-seed more beets when you set out the seedlings.

Whether planted early or late, beets are tastiest when they're the size of golf balls.

Try a different beet colour: Beyond red beets, 'Burpee Golden' looks like sunshine in a salad and 'Chiogga' is candy-striped in pink and white.

Peas come in three forms: garden peas (also called shell peas), snap peas and snow peas — the latter two with crisp, edible pods.

• Select from dwarf, midsize or tall types and early, mid-season or late varieties.
• Go with snap peas if you want the biggest yield per row.

Make a pea teepee: A decorative and practical way to plant peas is in a ring around a tepee. Use slender tree branches with plenty of twigs. Push 1.5-metre stakes about 30 centimetres  into the soil and plant peas at their base.

Often the first vegetables harvested in spring, radishes are great for salads or relishes, and the best-quality ones are grown quickly in cool soil.

• To encourage fast growth give radishes plenty of water; they can't tolerate drought conditions or heat waves.
• Sow them where they'll have partial shade at the hottest times of the day — planting near climbing beans or corn is ideal.
• If no shade is available, mulch the crop so it stays cool or use a summer-weight floating row cover.

Other kinds of radishes: Look for the popular 'Easter Egg' mix: radishes with skins of purple, lavender, pink or rose. 'French Breakfast' is a red oblong type with a white tip, while 'White Icicle', with pure white skin, grows into a graceful tapered form.

Spinach goes into high gear when it gets plenty of nitrogen.

• Plant in rich, fertile soil and feed plants weekly with 15 millilitres (one tablespoon) fish emulsion mixed with four litres of water, up until the week before you begin harvesting big, crisp leaves.

Try varied textures: Smooth-leafed varieties like 'Space' grow fast and make great baby salad greens, but varieties with crinkled, savoyed leaves, such as 'Tyee' and 'Bloomsdale Longstanding', become super-crisp in cold weather.

A beautiful green related to beets, Swiss chard is grown for both its crunchy leaf ribs and its deep green leaves. More tolerant of hot weather than other cooking greens, chard retains its mild flavour through the summer. You can eat Swiss chard raw, but it's better when lightly cooked.

• The more fertilizer and compost you give chard, the more it will grow. Dig in plenty of well-aged manure before planting this big eater. Once plants are 15 centimetres tall, feed with 5-10-5 fertilizer every month or so, using 85 grams (three ounces) per three-metre  row.

Turn on the lights: 'Bright Lights' is a colourful variety that includes plants with stems of electric colours, from yellows to deep violet red, and outside leaves that can be harvested to cut and come again all season long.