What are your first-time gardening tips?

GBH’s Morning Edition requested our viewers for temperature and gardening issues, and meteorologist Dave Epstein graciously answered them on the air. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Have a gardening or weather conditions question for meteorologist Dave Epstein? Tweet him @GrowingWisdom, electronic mail us at [email protected], or textual content 617-300-2008.

Epstein referred to as in Thursday morning with a copy of Johnny’s Picked Seeds catalogue by his facet, and there are a couple of points he’s enthusiastic to get into his yard.

“There’s a great deal of new kinds of carrots and radishes,” he stated. “You feel about a radish, it can be like, just pink on the outdoors and white on the within. But you will find so a lot of. They have distinctive shapes now. Some are a small yellow within, some are minimal pink inside of. The carrots, it truly is the very same thing.”

He is also enthusiastic about unique heirloom types of carrots — grown with appreciate and cooked with some butter and glazed with maple syrup.

“I believe they do flavor different, primarily when you start off receiving into some of the heirloom seed, some of the more mature seeds that they are bringing back,” he explained. “Some are a minor far more earthy, some are a minimal sweeter.”

Very long-vary forecasts do not provide the exact intent as a shopper-going through climate report, Epstein mentioned. It is also shortly to tell what the weather conditions will be like on any specific working day or 7 days down the line this spring, but meteorologists can forecast some larger sized trends.

“That said, if you look at the long selection 90-day forecast, which covers March, April and May possibly, it over-all seems to be hotter than common,” Epstein mentioned. “No shock, the local climate is warming up.”

Last summer’s drought does not look like it will be returning to the area, at the very least not in the spring, he mentioned.

“I’m very self-assured that we are not going to have the small sum of rain that we observed previous 12 months in spring and into the summer months due to the fact the pattern has transformed,” Epstein stated. “We’re out of the La Niña, now we’re headed to an El Niño, truly. So I do assume it’s likely to be wetter.”

That doesn’t imply non-stop rain is certain, he said — just that drought is considerably less most likely.

Make positive your vegetation have ample gentle, Epstein reported.

“You truly want to have complete bare minimum of four hours,” he stated. “You could get absent if it was like 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., but you want as much sunshine as attainable.”

Also key: large-quality soil, he said.

“The soil is the lifetime of all these veggies,” Epstein claimed. “If you are accomplishing a container back garden, you want to get container gardening soil for vegetables. It truly is organic. It won’t have a ton of chemical substances in it. If you’re in the ground, I would say you want to add compost, which won’t have to be high-priced. You want to be absolutely sure that it can be very well-drained. And once again, plenty of sunshine.”

Some crop recommendations: Radishes are quick and satisfying, Epstein claimed. Lettuces, Asian greens like bok choi, and kale are also reasonably easy, he mentioned.

“Put a pot of tomatoes out,” he reported. “Even if you do not have an in-floor backyard, just a container with tomatoes. It can be a bucket, one particular of these big buckets that you get at one of the significant box shops — as long as there is drainage.”

Epstein said raspberries developed subsequent to a deck should be fine, but suggested against planting crops within a container created of tension-taken care of wooden.

“I wouldn’t necessarily get worried about that, that the deck is that close,” he mentioned. “I wouldn’t develop a raised bed out of pressure treated wood simply because there is some imagined that some of the chemical substances may possibly leach in. But I wouldn’t fret about that with the raspberries.”

“One of the points that is good about the metropolis is that there is a good deal of outdoor space,” Epstein mentioned. “I assume just heading down to the Boston Common and just walking close to Boston seeing all those people spring bouquets is undoubtedly easy to do.”

Epstein’s other favorites include things like: the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s Garden at Elm Lender , which opens April 1 Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, which has some attractive flowering trees the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Basic, and the New England Botanic Backyard at Tower Hill in Boylston.