What to plant in pots

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

When you have a small yard, pots are a great way to extend your garden and harvest.  You read that you can grow anything in pots.  And you can.  So, how do you decide what is best to plant in the ground and what is best for your pots?

For me, it has been a matter of trial and error.  I have decorative pots for the patio, front porch, and parking pad.  I also have my 4 workhorses-my Earthboxes.  Earthbox advertises that you can grow humongous tomatoes in them.  I am sure you can with the right fertilizer and watering.  Since I don’t want to spend that much effort on my pots (and I travel a lot for work so I don’t want to leave it for my hubby), I have figured out which veggies do well with little care in pots for me in my climate.  

Your climate has a significant impact on what will do well in your pots.  With pots, they are moveable so you can move your lettuce from the full sun in spring to the shade in a hot summer to lengthen the time before it bolts.  Pots get warmer than the earth in the summer and cooler in the winter.  You can use this to your advantage in your zone for what you want to grow.

What I have settled on in my Zone 6 is greens and annual herbs in my Earthboxes to move them seasonally; kale, Egyptian walking onions, beets and hot peppers seem to do great in our decorative pots; zucchini and eggplant do fairly well.  Depending on how hot it gets, dwarf cucumbers can do nicely here.

I plant the tomatoes, garlic, bulb onions, dill, cilantro, basil, winter squash, and chard in the ground.  I grow chard as a perennial so it gets quite large.  This year I am going to put the sweet peppers and cucumber in the ground.  Sweet peppers are just not as prolific as hot peppers.  Being the ground should give both increased yields.  

How do you decide what to plant for small spaces??

Monday, January 23, 2012

Living on a golf course, there are rules we have to follow for meeting the “standards of the community.”  Basically, this means that our veggie garden needs to look pretty.

My husband was concerned that the “landscape police,” as I call them, would come calling if we plowed up the backyard and put in a row garden as we recall our grandparents did so we knew the old fashioned approach was out.

The solution was to intersperse the veggies in the flower garden and in the flower pots on our patio.  Flowers are good for your crops as they attract pollinators.  So, it is a win-win for beauty and productivity.  I have been reading lately on companion planting that gives different flowers that are particularly good to plant with your veggies.  More on that in a future blog!

We have to be choiceful on what to plant since we don’t have much space and there just isn’t room to grow everything that looks great and I would love to try.  There are so many cool veggies you can grow from around the world.  The choices are just about limitless.

When I first started veggie gardening three years ago, I did as most new gardeners and wanted to try a little bit of everything!  A couple of seasons have taught me what is most productive for our small space and what I will buy from the local farmer’s market.

This year I will plant for the two of us-3 tomato plants (Juliet, Yellow Pear, and Brandywine), 1 zucchini, 1 cucumber (for salads and pickles), 1 chard (for salads and steamed greens), a few kale, 1 acorn winter squash, 7 pepper plants (3 sweet peppers for salsa, 1 cayenne for salsa and drying, 1 pimento for salads, 1 pablano/ancho pepper for chile powder), various lettuces, various spinach,  a couple parsley, 3 cilantro, 1 dill, various beets, 3 basil, 10 garlic, and egyptian walking onions.

We grow the lettuce, spinach, chard, volunteer red giant mustard, and parsley year round for fresh salads and steamed greens.  We reseed around 4-5 times a year to keep a steady supply of lettuce and spinach. The lettuce does reseed, but not as frequent as needed to keep us in lettuce year round.  We assist by broadcast seeding with the reseeding done naturally. The red giant mustard reseeds itself as does the parsley.  The chard is a perennial so as long as you only take outside leaves, it stays forever (it has been in our garden three years now).

I look for varieties that are compact or recommended for pots.  These tend to take up less space or are adapted to pots.

I am not growing broccoli or cabbage this year.  They take up a lot of space, take a long time to mature, and are relatively inexpensive to purchase.

Peas were great if you wanted to do the snow peas.  Regular peas require many plants and lots of time shelling for a small quantity of peas.

My bush green beans didn’t do well so I tried pole beans last year.  I grew them in pots with a trellis for them to climb and with petunias so it was ornamental, too.  They did decent.  I had some that did really well.  These were the ones I remembered to cover with inoculant that improves their productivity before planting.  They all had pretty flowers.

I still have turnips in the freezer from this past year so we did not eat many.  I’ll just pick up a few at the farmer’s market.  Turnips do not take up much space and are easy to grow.  

I grew 6 tomatoes this past year.  5 of the 6 were the bigger slicing or paste tomatoes.  They do not seem to produce nearly as much as the Juliet and Yellow Pear.  I am cutting back to 3 tomatoes, 1 slicer and the smaller tomatoes.  This will be all we need to eat in the summer for salsa, salads and burgers as well as canning for sauce and freezing for salsa.

My advice is to think about what you eat frequently, look at the space they require, where you can place them, how long it takes for them to mature.  Lay out a plan and just try it!  Even if you only plant 1 or 2 things, it is fun to watch it grow and nothing tastes as good as fresh off the vine/out of the ground.

I’ll get into what to put in pots versus in the ground in my next blog.

Quick and easy greens indoors-sprouts!

Monday, January 16, 2012

Winter doesn’t mean you can’t eat fresh greens.  There are many that grow well indoors and many different ways of growing them.

Something easy and nutritious are sprouts.  I bought a simple, inexpensive sprout grower.  You can get seeds on-line.  I bought mine at a local grocery store.  It was a mix of seeds so I get a nice variety.

With a simple sprout grower, you can have nutritious sprouts of many different veggies, beans, and/or grasses in 3-5 days.  All you do is put a teaspoon of seeds in the grower and water it twice daily.

Sprouts are great on salads, in eggs, or just as a quick snack.

Choosing tomatoes for growing

Friday, January 6, 2012

There are hundreds of tomatoes to choose from.  There are whole catalogues devoted to America’s most raised home vegetable.  There is nothing like a homegrown tomato, fresh off the vine!

I prefer heirloom, organic veggies.  I love the idea of these seeds being handed down from generation to generation with loving care, through good times and bad.  Back in the day, every vegetable was precious.  You should save the seeds from your very best tasting, performing plant with the biggest fruits.  It was a sacrifice to take the biggest, juiciest fruit for its seeds.  Seeds were like gold back then.

Family lore has it that my great grandfather killed a man in self defense when one of my great uncles stole some seeds the neighbor had ordered.  The neighbor came with a gun and confronted my great grandfather for the theft of his seeds.  The family had to leave the state, worried that the law would come after him.  At least, that is a story I heard told.........

This year I have told myself I am going to stick with 3 tomato plants.  2 for canning and salads and one for slicing tomatoes.  

You may be surprised with my canning tomatoes choices.  I get great yields with Juliet (a hybrid, 1999 All American) and Yellow Pear (a heirloom from pre-1800).  Both are indeterminate, meaning they produce from summer through frost.  The Juliet is a mini Roma, great taste, very prolific.  I have read that they are great for drying as well.  I am going to try sun drying them this fall (using my electric dehydrator, too humid in the Midwest to “sun dry’).

The slicer-has to be the heirloom Brandywine, dates back to 1885.  It continues to win taste tests to this day.  I tried a grafted tomato last year from Territorial Seed Co.  I think that is the route I will go again this year.  A graft is an age-old technique of taking a strong root stock and grafting a tasty plant on to it.

Between these 3 tomatoes, we should have enough for eating, freezing for salsa, and canning that will last us until the next year.  

The seed catalogs are in full swing!

Thursday, January 5, 2012

It is that time of year as the winter wind is blowing and the dreary days seem endless; the time to dream of warm weather, spring breezes, and green things sprouting once again.  Every gardener looks forward to the new year’s bounty of seed catalogs.  You can spend long hours browsing the possibilities for the coming season, imagining what you want to plant where.  What looks interesting to try this year, to reminisce on what worked well last year.

The biggest challenge is controlling the urge to go a little wild on the seed and plant ordering!

Last fall, I did as I always do, make myself a list of what I want to grow the following spring and summer.  If I could only just stick to it.............

A couple of tips on seeds and seed catalogues and terms used.  They can be a little on the confusing side.

For seed catalogues, the best to order from are those that do their trials in your region of the country.  The seeds and plants they carry are the ones that have performed the best for them in their trial gardens.  Here is a link that lets you sort by state to find those in your area. 

http://www.motherearthnews.com/directories/seed-and-plant-directory.aspx?directory=140226

So, what do all those terms mean that you hear-GMO, Heirloom, Hybrid, Organic?

-GMO: Genetically Modified Organism.  Typically the Big Ag Chemical/ Seed companies inject genetic materials into seeds that kill living things like pesticides.  They have also genetically modified them to withstand  massive doses of herbicides.  I don’t think anything that has been genetically altered to be able to kill other living organisms is the healthiest to be eating, if you know what I mean.  The first field trials of GMO’s began in the 1980’s.  Monsanto is the big GMO (and herbicide chemical company).

-Heirloom:  Heirlooms are not genetically modified, they are open-pollinated, not a modern hybrid, been developed using classic breeding procedures, are at least older than 1951.  Some believe only those that are 100 years old qualify.  Heirlooms have been handed down from generation to generation.  

-Hybrid: They are a modern cross between 2 different plants.  Many are infertile; they will not produce viable seed. Hybrids seeds will not yield the same plant as the parent.  Hybrids are typically bred to provide plants that have better yields, better disease protection.  Many feel that hybrids sacrifice flavor for their other attributes.

-Organic: Seeds can only be labeled as organic if they were grown by certified organic farmers.  The criteria for being certified organic is very stringent.  Organics cannot be genetically modified.  Organics cannot have been grown with any synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or fertilizers being used.  A farmer has to be chemical free for 3 years before they can be certified organic (and keep very detailed records to prove how they grew their seeds and be inspected yearly).

So, if you want to buy organic heirlooms, you need to make sure that it is labeled as such.  Just being a heirloom does not mean it was raised organically.  You can also have organic hybrids.  

You cannot have organic GMO’s as no GMO can be labeled organic!

On a similar note, many are not sure what the difference is between natural and organic labels we see in the grocery store: 

-It is pretty simple, nothing can be labeled organic that contains GMO’s.

-Natural only means that artificial or synthetic ingredients have been added to it after it was butchered (for meat/fish) or harvested.  It gives you no information on how it was raised.  It can be GMO (70-90% of what is labeled as “natural” contains GMO’s).  It can be raised using synthetic fungicides, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.  It can be from factory farm animals.  Natural refers only to what is added to after it was raised and harvested. 

Growing avocado from seed

Avocado seed growing roots

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

I get itchy in the winter for something to watch grow.  My mother told me how as a child when she lived in Florida they had avocado trees in the backyard and she grew baby trees from seeds all the time and it was easy!

She explained all you had to do was to stick toothpicks into the avocado to support its top above the water in a glass and wait for it to sprout.

I had tried a few years back to grow avocado from seed.  I waited, waited, and waited but my poor seed never sprouted.

I decided to try again this year...........

I stacked my odds by trying 3 seeds at the same time, each in their own glass.  First, you need to use only ripe avocados.  I used the ones that were more than ripe just to be sure!  You clean them up really good, then insert the toothpicks.  Keep the tops of the seed above the water with the bottom always submerged.  Make sure the water stays clean.  Then, wait patiently for a couple of weeks.

All three of my seeds are cracking and sprouting!  The root comes down first then the top makes it way out.  The pic above is of my seed that is the furthest along.  Its top is starting on its way up.

Some say that chlorine free water works best.  I am using water from our reverse osmosis system.

A last tip, the big part of the seed is the bottom and should go into the water.  They are very similar looking to tulip  bulbs.