What do you like to grow in your vegetable garden?

[Quilter]

I manage a large garden at church with another woman. We call it a teaching, sharing, benevolence garden.

Here’s what we have in the ground so far:

Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Bush and pole beans
Malabar spinach
Asparagus beans
Strawberries
Zucchini
Kale
Herbs
Fennel

I’m looking for more ideas. We have empty space. It’s taken time to get it in decent shape this year. Is it too late to start brussel sprouts from seed? Also thought we might try pak choy. We’re in Michigan so our season is short.

I visit the garden on Hilton Head when we visit in April. I’m so envious of their mountainous supply of horse manure and their long growing season. They were harvesting ginormous onions when we were there.

 

[DancingWaters]

Tomatoes-regular, roma, grape
Peppers-red, green, yellow
Sweet Corn-white, bicolored
Zuchinni squash
Strawberries
Pumpkins
Red Beets

 

[jimf41]

Tomatoes and Zinnias

 

[stmartinfan]

I like growing broccoli, but start with plants not seed. Also doing Brussels sprouts and eggplant starting with plants this year. If you have space you could grow some winter squash.

 

[Passepartout]

Boy-Howdy! By comparison, I'm a garden lightweight. A piker. I have a couple of raised beds with tomatoes (Early Girl, cherry, and Big boy) Then in the herb garden, I have Basil, Mint( in pots) French Tarragon, Oregano, Italian Parsley, some cilantro, a planter of lettuce greens. Chives. DW has a variety of roses. Tending them is an exercise in blood letting to me. Today, we spread our third pickup load of bark chunks- I think 5 will dress up the bare parts of the beds.

Then of course, there are the rhubarb and butterfly bushes and lavender that we don't mess with except to make crumb topped goodies with strawberrys or the neighbors raspberrys if I can sneak a bowlful.

Jim

 

[heathpack]

Mint, basil, rosemary, thyme, sage, tarragon, chives

Pomegranates, lemons and grapefruit

Honestly everything else here is cheaper to buy at the produce or farmers market that gardening doesn’t make financial sense. As long as you stick to in-season vegetables.

 

[pedro47]

Tomatoes and cucumbers

 

[Bucky]

We have four raised beds planted. Three of them are relatively small (8x20) but the large one is 20x20.
In the smaller ones we have blackberry, blueberry and strawberries. In the large one we have tomatoes, jalapeños, basil and a few more blueberry bushes. The neighbors love us. The better half just handed out fresh blueberry and strawberry jelly to them and they know the tomatoes and blackberries are starting to produce now. She’s a hoarder with her blueberries though! LOL

 

[mdurette]

I believe you may be in zone 5 - if so, this may help!

 

[mdurette]

If you can't find a "veggie" to fit your space. Plant a bunch of Zinnia's or dahlias (both the tall variety) so your gardeners can enjoy a small bouquet of fresh flowers when they come.

My garden is taking shape. I tried so hard to limit the veggies - but people kept bringing me plants and I kept on planting them!
I now have 14 tomato plants and 8 cucumber mounds! We also have a fingerling potatoes, peppers, watermelon, butternut squash, pumpkins, peas and green/yellow beans.

My cut flower garden which is larger this year is filled with 100s of bulbs, zinnias, snap dragons, dahlias, sunflowers and a handful of perennials.

 

[RonB]

Both my parents were raised on farms, so I used to grow a big garden. Now I am down to tomatoes, sweet corn, and butterbeans. I also have a Montmorency cherry tree and six blueberry bushes.

I grow because fresh picked is soooo much better than what you can buy in stores. If you have never picked corn and cooked it immediately, you have missed the best flavor. And commercial tomato growers grow for looks and shipping ability - not flavor.

 

[bbodb1]

No okra?

 

[Big Matt]

Not sure how your weather is up there, but different types of melons area easy to grow. Same with pumpkins

 

[Quilter]

No okra?

Actually I did put in 2 okra plants. Forgot about those.

Along the fence we have blackberry bushes.

Outside the garden we have serviceberry trees (June berries/Amelanchier) and mulberry trees. We harvest those too.

We have multiple types of pollinator friendly flowers that reseed every year: sunflowers, love-in-the-mist, borage, cornflower, California poppies.

I'm going to search local nurseries to see what they have left to offer.

My husband retired from his main job this year. He was tired of the mess the lawn service would make of the grass in our shady areas with the zero turn on the big mowers. We bought a battery powered, self-propelled lawn mower. He's now producing lots of great grass clippings for me. We have a wooded lot so I get lots of leaves. I'm dreaming of great compost.

 

[bbodb1]

Sounds like y'all have a wonderful setup there, Quilter. Many years ago, I lived in Michigan and I miss the much better weather there.
We now live in Arkansas and humidity pervades our every moment. I know Dante wrote about this.........

 

[bizaro86]

Have you considered adding carrots? It's probably not too late, and they are relatively popular.

Pomegranates, lemons and grapefruit.

I am jealous of your climate. I would love to have pomegranates.

 

[MULTIZ321]

Both my parents were raised on farms, so I used to grow a big garden. Now I am down to tomatoes, sweet corn, and butterbeans. I also have a Montmorency cherry tree and six blueberry bushes.

I grow because fresh picked is soooo much better than what you can buy in stores. If you have never picked corn and cooked it immediately, you have missed the best flavor. And commercial tomato growers grow for looks and shipping ability - not flavor.

Hi Ron.

What is your favorite tomato variety for flavor?

Thanks.

Richard

 

[RonB]

Hi Richard. I was raised on Marglobe, but it has almost no disease resistance, and years of rotating tomatoes throughout my garden have spread the soil borne diseases throughout the garden. Then I started growing Celebrity and had some success with that, but again, soil borne diseases make growing that variety difficult. The specific diseases are are early and late blight. I found two supposedly blight resistant varieties at Seeds 'n Such this year, but haven't had the season to evaluate yet.

If you have not had a problem with blight, I suggest Celebrity. It tastes great and produces good lookin' and very tasty tomatoes.

An interesting note on size - if you pull the suckers off tomato plants, some believe you will get larger tomatoes. If you leave them, the tomatoes will be smaller, but the total production per plant will be higher. This info is debatable, but it's what I have been told since childhood by farming relatives.

 

[clifffaith]

I put a post on Nextdoor, and had easily a dozen people express interest in coming to dig up our artichoke plants to take home to their own gardens. The first two people who came wiped us out of plants. I don't eat them, so I don't cook them, and Cliff melted one too many steamers. If artichokes grow in your area, they are great producers and at the end of the growing season you can divide the plants to have even more the following year.

Cliff loves growing red potatoes, in spite of the razzing he takes from our Italian friends that they are cheaper to buy in the store. They seem to "travel" and migrate to spots where they weren't planted, so always fun to find one where we didn't expect it. In other homes we've inherited or bought teepees on which to grow strawberries and enjoyed going out to pick a handful at a time. These last two years Cliff has grown them in beds, and we pick a quart every other day, they are fabulous!

And once again he put several trellis up for green beans. We don't cook, so the beans used to bug me because they forced me to plan a meal around them. But this year I hit on the perfect meal -- Trader Joe's Sweet Potato Fries (or a box of Spanish rice), burgers on the grill (no buns), and green beans. I handle the fries and beans, he does the burgers.

 

[LisaH]

I mainly grow tomatoes and fava beans. I also have seeds for Shanghainese Bok Choy from a friend. Will try in Aug/Sep.

 

[Ralph Sir Edward]

Purple hulled peas.

 

[klpca]

I have a brown thumb but for some reason, I can grow herbs successfully. My regulars (use all the time) are thyme, oregano, and rosemary. I have sage and cilantro as well, but basil somehow eludes me - turns too yellow to be appetizing. We set up our raised beds in our front courtyard and I suspect that sunlight is the primary issue with regular veggies. Our backyard exposure would be so much better but we put the planting beds in during the "Buddy" years, and he had access to the backyard and viewed anything growing there as "his", so we gave up.

 

[heathpack]

...commercial tomato growers grow for looks and shipping ability - not flavor.

Which is why you don’t buy tomatoes that have been shipped. This I guess is a California thing. Easy to buy tomatoes that were grown within biking distance of my house.

OMG the strawberries I can buy here from Feb-ish through Nov-ish. Delicious. My favorite is the Gaviotas, too soft to ship. If all I can get is Chandlers (the hard supermarket berries), the answer is: don’t buy the strawberries.

I’m pretty sure our local tomato, corn and strawberry growers do a much better job than I could...

 

[Patri]

Tomatoes, zinnias, sunflowers

 

[Icc5]

We have raised beds that my son grows vegetables in and my wife uses a couple of them to grow gourds. My son grows green beans,tomatoes,egg plants, several different squash,green onions. Then out front right outside our kitchen we have an herb garden with about 15 different herbs in it.
Bart