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Veggie garden – please help me decide!
- This topic has 9 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 6 months ago by
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Someone has blessed me with a square foot gardening frame (it’s a method my deceased sister used for years with great success), I have soil, a sunny place to put it, and it has stopped raining here. I’m very excited, but I can’t decide what to plant!!!
I have 3 tomato plants (Beefmaster, Early Girl, and Grape), 1 green bell pepper, and 1 red cabbage that I received a few days ago while helping at a spring plant fundraiser event. I don’t want to plant all tomatoes, but I know we’ll use them. I also want to get at least one more green bell pepper plant, as I can freeze those since we use them often.
What else would be easy to plant and take care of? I sure wish my sister was still around, except then she’d probably have me building more frames and planting enough to run my own farmer’s market…..and we only have a postage stamp-sized yard!
I was thinking of cucumbers; I’ve heard you can use tall skinny poles to train them upward. I see that the one from Veyseys is a bush type. I’ve never seen those before!
Hmmm….celery….do I know any Amish couples getting married in the fall that are short on celery? Tee-hee, any of you who are hooked on those Amish books by authors like Beverly Lewis will know what I’m talking about. 😀
IMHO – no sense in even planting tomatoes unless you plant basil and cilantro to go with it. If you keep the blossoms on the basil snipped you’ll have plenty all season. The cabbage is probably a colder weather plant to grow – double check, but it may not do well in the heat of summer. If you just have one 4 by 4 frame you probably won’t have room for much more than the 3 tomatoes, pepper, herb or two and a couple cucumbers. I believe they recommend 1 tomato per 2 square feet so of your 16 squares – 6 should be devoted to the tomatos and even then you’re going to have to prune to keep them under control. 1 herb or pepper per square. 2 cucumbers per square but make sure you trellis them. You could also do 16 radishes per square or some beets in a square.
Blessings,
Rebekah
Yeah, I think we are in zone 6b, although one government website said 5b…..I’ve had 4 queries on different sites return 6b, so let’s go with that. We’re not really pea-loving folks, so that’s no biggie, but I’m hoping the red cabbage will make it. (Maybe that’s why they were so willing to give me the red cabbage plant! They knew it needed to go….)
The tomato recommendation from Mel Bartholomew’s book is 1 vine tomato per square foot and 4 bush tomatoes per square foot, so I have to see if the grape tomatoes are a bush variety or not.
Ooh, radishes….that’s a great idea. Last fall, I followed someone’s suggestion to use them as a lower-carb substitute for red-skinned potatoes in a roast pan with beef & carrots, and they turned out yummy!
Thanks for all of the suggestions.
Sue, you can still get yourself some of the cold weather plants and as the season winds up for your tomatoes, you can plant plant your cold weather items.
Note: radishes will be quite spicey hot the hotter the weather is. They are typically a spring/fall crop.
Other spring/fall crops:
cabbage
lettuce
bok choi
spinach
peasSummer plants:
tomatoes
peppers
onions
green beans
broccoli
cauliflower
melons
squash (zukes, yellow, pan, acorn, etc)
cukestomatoes, zukes, cukes, many squash, and some melon can be trellis or pole trained with enough support and can work well in a small space.
If there are any deer around, they are sure to prune and keep them tomatoe plants under control for you…munch, munch. I have heard that playing a radio at night helps keep them away.
We are in our second year gardening, so I am still learning much. I plan to plant lettuce and spinach for a fall harvest but I am not sure when to plant – in August?
Well, if the deer aren’t believers, they won’t like the radio station I play, so that might actually work!
I did purchase some seeds that I can get in the ground in the next two days. (My kids are on vacation, so what am I doing for fun–late night shopping at Wheeee-mart, of course!) I can’t quite remember, but I know I bought green beans, cukes, radishes, zucchini, and I think, oh, yeah, I got some lettuce, too. The lettuce can go in around August, I guess.
I don’t think spicier radishes will be a problem for roasting. I boil them a bit first, and it seems to take the bite out of them quite nicely. After roasting, they taste a lot like red potatoes.
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