Vertical Vegetable Gardens Yield
Big Flavour From A Small Space
Can I Really Grow Vegetables? Yes. It's very simple. Follow my simple
carrot story to see how.
Why would I Bother?
Yes, There are great potential dollar savings and the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors while pulling weeds in the hot summer sun, but the real reason to give vegetables a space in your garden is - taste! Yes you can go to the local farmer’s market, if you are lucky enough to have one near to you. They will sell you a wonderful tasting Tomato or Cucumber or Potato but !! Somehow just leaving the car in the driveway
and shuffling out to the vegetable gardens in your fuzzy slippers and housecoat to pick and eat, on the spot, the Tomato that your own effort has produced is - - - - ! Why do you think I keep a salt shaker in my housecoat pocket?
Did you know that one seed catalogue lists 65 varieties of Tomato. That’s about 60 other reasons to grow your own vegetables. The farmer’s market will only be selling the other five varieties. Who wants to have their choices restricted.
Is It All Just Tomatoes
I use
tomato here as an obvious example. There are a wide range of wonderful tasting vegetables that you can grow at home. If you are one of those weird people who profess not to like eating vegetables then how did you ever get to this page?
Don’t click away. Stay, open your mind, listen and allow yourself the opportunity to try strange things and just maybe, discover what you have been missing. In the pages that follow this I will try to introduce you to some of the amazing vegetables, from
Aubergine to
Zucchini, that can be easily grown in home vegetable gardens.
I’ll also point out the things that I don’t think are worth the effort and there are a few. Freshly picked Corn has a sweetness that no purchased Corn can match. You put the water on to boil before you go out to pick it. Corn, unfortunately takes up considerable space and is the favourite garden vegetable of that dominant city pest, the racoon.
Where Can I Grow Them?
Space is a major concern. I will try to show you, through these pages, as many innovative ideas as I can to maximize the use of limited space. I call my techniques, Vertical Vegetables. There are lots of vegetables that can be grown up, instead of out, such as Peas and the supports that I use are primarily inexpensive and easy to create. There are some that are as decorative as they are useful and I’ll show you why I can use my Cucumber plants as a front yard accent. To really maximize space try a Pillar of Peppers.
Besides the space above your garden, you can find lots of little shared spaces in the rest of your gardens. There is really no need for separate vegetable gardens and none of the delicious food that you can grow actually benefits from being planted in a straight row. Some
like lettuce, will even tolerate a bit of shade. There is also quite a number of delicious vegetables that
happily grow in pots.
How Do I Start?
Today would be a wonderful time to start. Go to my
seed catalogue page and have a look at some of the internet sources. See, now you are a vegetable gardener. Feels great doesn’t it. There are two basic groups of vegetables that we grow at home. Long season types such as Tomatoes,
Peppers, eggplant, Onions and their cousins, Leeks that have to be started early indoors and shorter season types, carrots, beets, cucumbers and and beans whose seeds we can put directly into the vegetable gardens. I’ll try to outline each of those types in the pages on proper planting times so that you will have some idea of what to do when.
The first time you try vegetables it is probably just as easy to go to the garden centre and buy plants for the long season types. If, I should say when, you learn to like this activity you will naturally want to start growing your own transplants from seeds.
It’s really very easy. Again it’s as much about variety choices there are dozens of Onion varieties as it is about the joy and therapeutic benefits of Dallying In The Dirt.
When Do I Start?
For those things where you can plant seeds directly into the soil,
there are three important times in the spring. Each type of seed has a preference for when it want’s to get out of bed in the spring and get started growing. I’ll lead you through all of that. The same three dates are equally important for transplanting your little started plants into your vegetable gardens. Tomatoes freeze and rot in April and
Pak Choi will fry and frizzle in July. Potatoes, which are actually
grown from small pieces of Potato, tend to do better with a bit of an early start.
Asparagus is wonderfully different. It's perennial and you only have to plant it once every thirty years.
Keep returning to www.gardening-enjoyed.com in the coming weeks as the pages on Vegetables will continue to grow and feed you the necessary information. We’ll even tell you some interesting ways to
serve the vegetables that you have grown.
The Cruciferae family has many cousins that are very welcome in our garden. Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kohl Rabi to name just a few members of this delicious and easy to grow group.
Sometimes laziness is its own reward. I plant too many beans and I don't get around to picking them all in the summer. That leaves me with a wonderful crop of dried beans in the autumn and a whole new taste treat.
Now nobody would consider
Raspberries or
Melons vegetables but we certainly find them wonderful additions to our vegetable gardens.
You can search my entire site for answers to your other gardening mysteries.
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