What are you planting in YOUR garden?

 

A question came in via email "What are you planting in your garden this year?"

First, I want to clarify that we have TWO gardens.

Mrs ERJ has her garden and it is a kitchen garden that focuses on salad ingredients and quick-summer-meal ingredients.

She wants a single, cherry tomato plant. Hastey's nursery sells some that are 30" tall and are an early variety on an indeterminate vine. They are expensive but she is worth it.

She wants Super Sugar Snap peas planted in three "flights" a week apart.

She wants one cucumber vine. Tasty Jade has been a favorite but they are sold out.

She wants one zucchini plant. We trialed a yellow and a green variety and she like the yellow ones. They tasted the same and it was easier to find and pick the yellow.

She wants sweet pepper plants and scads of green onions.

Other women might want diamonds and BMWs, vacations in Cancun and diamond tiaras. Mrs ERJ wants vegetables. Well! I can afford vegetable seeds.

Odd-and-ends fill in the rest of the garden. Plants like basil and green beans.

She likes the garden long-and-skinny. Last years was 20 feet long by about 5 feet wide. She said that is about right.

It requires a fence to keep the animals out.

She likes a path of wood-chips around the garden so she doesn't sink into the mire after a rain.

The other garden

I intend to plant a couple pounds of beans for drying. Keeping the bunnies, woodchucks and deer out of them will be a chore. I will also plant some purple-podded pole-beans to keep the seed strain viable. They were all the rage in the seed trade about ten years ago but now seem to have disappeared.

We have been eating more dried beans now that the kids (for the most part) left the house. In fact, I have a pot of them I made the other day that turned out well. Belladonna picked the recipe. The basic recipe accepts ad lib additions well. Ginger, tomato, vinegar, cayenne, smoke flavor...knock yourself out.

Potatoes and dried corn are in the plans.

I intend to trial Hopi Black Dye sunflower this year. 

Kimchi is sometimes called Korean Penicillin or Korean Prozac

I will trial three kinds of Korean Radishes this year. We trialed three Asian Cabbage last year and Hwi Mo Ri did well. The seed packs for this variety had three times as many seeds as China Gold and Winter Crisp so we are growing HMR again this year. 

It is very possible to get a full crop of snap peas by planting early and then a second crop of Chinese cabbage or radishes. The CC would be seeded in trays July 4ish and then moved to the garden three weeks later when the peas are gone. 

It MIGHT be possible to get a crop of green beans and CC or radishes but I would have to interplant the new crop while harvesting the last of the old.

Three kinds of tomatoes will be trialed for drying: Stupice, Sweet Aperitif and Principe Borghese. Some of the plants will be placed in the hedge planting to see if they will naturalize. As a sidenote, I have seen sandbars in rivers that were absolutely covered with a jungle of tomato plants. The plants had regressed to a Yellow Pear-like variety. The had very little flavor so I did not keep any seeds although I was impressed with how well they grew. The nearest water-treatment plant was fifteen miles upstream.

I will plant a bunch of watermelon varieties this year to see which ones Mrs ERJ likes. I settled on Diplomat Honeydew as our "muskmelon" variety. Its only flaw is that it bares in one big surge and then it is done.

I will plant two hills of Butternut squash plants from saved seeds. By next winter there will just be the two of us and Mrs ERJ does not eat very much. One squash every couple of weeks is probably all we will eat. Too much Vitamin A might improve Mrs ERJ's eyesight to the point where she will notice how homely I am.

I will probably plant several, small flights of Romaine lettuce. Romaine lettuce varieties seem to be more resistant to bolting than other lettuce types AS LONG AS I NEVER LET THE SOIL DRY OUT.

The plan for the garden is influenced by how much stored food we have in our pantry. We are still good for canned tomatoes and frozen sweet corn so there is little incentive to plant big tomatoes or sweet corn. I might plant one "beefsteak" type tomato for slicing.

I encourage you to write in the comments section. I think there are many folks teetering on the precipice of getting into gardening. They are spooked by supply chain issues and rising prices. Teaser questions are "If you could only plant a single plant?" or "A garden plant that is absolutely bulletproof and that kids will eat?"

If I could only plant one thing...a single plant...it would be Mrs ERJ's cherry tomato. One dystopian trajectory has the government making a stab at keeping people fed by distributing bland staples like tortillas, flour, shortening, dried beans. Flavor will be in short supply. The second plant (or plants) are Mrs ERJ's green onions because they can be harvested very shortly after planting or left to bulb for storage. Hot peppers and garlic tie for third place.