Grow productive, easy veggies, plus new video & recipe for braised cabbage with herbs
Newsletter January 27, 2010
The ultimate local food comes from your own backyard. Or front yard, porch, or pots in a sunny window. Read on for tips on easy, essential plants for your garden, no matter what size. Also find a recipe for Braised Cabbage with Herbs that raises this humble vegetable to a new level.
What's easy to grow?
I read somewhere that it's easiest to grow leaves, then seeds, and finally fruits. Makes sense, because the less a plant has to produce to provide food, the less sun, water, and nutrients it needs.
- Leaf crops, such as lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, and Asian cabbage are a snap to grow, as are leafy herbs such as basil and parsley. Radishes grow quickly and can be planted early, working well as markers for slower growing plants.
- With more sun, you can grow beans of all sorts, sugar-snap peas, cucumbers, summer squash, okra, and peppers.
- Most demanding of resources and most in demand by pests are tomatoes, melons, and stone fruit such as peaches and cherries.
Look for inspiration at one of my favorite seed vendors, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. They carry 1,400 heirloom seeds, all open pollinated and none genetically modified. Owner Jere Gettle is a passionate advocate for the pure food movement as well as seeming like a really nice guy with a great success story. He founded Baker Heirloom Seeds when he was just 17, back in 1998.
What's hard to buy?
Last year I was rarely able to find organic green beans in the grocery store or at the farmers' market. Turns out that if you grow big fields of them, the flea beetles come to feast. This is not as much of a problem in a home garden. But the real problem is that green beans take a lot of picking if you are trying to gather baskets full to sell. But picking a few handfuls for dinner at home is downright pleasant, especially if you grow varieties that climb up trellis. Plant marigolds around your beans to repel Mexican bean beetles and catnip to discourage flea beetles (and encourage your kitties).
What will come back year after year?
Some years, the only food I gathered from the garden came from plants that had been there for years. Even during my busiest times, I could always count on a getting a sprig of rosemary, snip of chives, and as much lemon balm as I could use. My blueberry bushes and fig trees produce lots of fruit most years without ever being sprayed or getting other special treatment. My neighbor Marge taught me the trick: harvest fruit just after dawn, before the birds can get to the fruit that ripened overnight.
Pot it up!
Even if you don't have space for a garden, grow basil and chives in pots. Lettuce and other greens look lovely with a few pansies mixed in. I have a friend who grows a huge garden in containers, including tomatoes. But you can grow containers of attractive, edible plants even if you have a strict neighborhood association or only an eighth-floor window.
Location, location, location.
Of course, what works here in central North Carolina may not work at all for you in Arizona or Minnesota. Some of you will be able to grow citrus and others rhubarb. Call your county extension agent to ask what vegetables and fruit are easiest to grow where you live.
Check out my new video on YouTube to learn how to save time, money, and frustration in the kitchen by using a kitchen scale. In the workshop at Whole Foods Saturday, participants measured between 120 and 163 grams of flour into a cup ... with 120 grams being the amount recommended by the manufacturer and used in Cook for Good recipes. Do you keep running out of flour? Are your cakes and bread dry? You need a scale!
So easy, so tasty, so cheap! If you grew up with over-boiled cabbage at home or at a school cafeteria, you'll be amazed at how tasty this rugged vegetable can be. Cabbage's mild flavor lets just a little bit of butter go a long way, making this a low-fat recipe as well.
Thanks for reading and doing your part, larger or small, to make a difference in the world by eating seasonal food cooked from scratch.
Have a delicious day!
... Linda
