25 Plants You Should Consider Growing
Sharon February 10th, 2009
There are a million gardening books out there to tell you how to grow perfect tomatoes and lettuces. And that’s important – in my house, salsa is a food group. But the reality is that for those of us attempting to produce a large portion of our calories, tomatoes and lettuce are not sufficient – we need to get either the most calories or the best possible nutrition out of our kitchen gardens and landscaping. So I’ve compiled a list of plants that I think are an important addition to many home gardens – both annual and perennial.
1. Buckwheat. Buckwheat is the perfect multipurpose plant. Many of you have probably used it as a green manure, taking advantage of its remarkable capacity to shade out weeds and produce lots of green material. But it is also one of the easiest grains to grow in the garden – simply let it mature and harvest the seed, and it makes a delicious and highly nutritious salad and cooking green. Although it won’t be quite as good at soil building if you do it this way, buckwheat can be used as a triple-purpose crop – plant a few beds with it, harvest the greens steadily (but lightly) for salad (it is particularly good during the heat of summer since it has a lightly nutty taste not too far off lettuce and will grow in hot weather), cook some of the mature greens, harvest seed, cut the plants back to about an inch leaving the plant material on the ground. The buckwheat will then grow back up again, and you can harvest young salad greens and cut it back again for green manure.
2. Sweet potatoes. Think this is a southern crop? Not for me. I grow “Porto Rico” sweet potatoes in upstate New York. Garden writer Laura Simon grows them on cool, windy Nantucket. I’ve met people who grow them in Ontario and North Dakota. Sweet potatoes have quite a range if started indoors, and more northerners should grow them. They are enormously nutritious, store extremely well (some of my sweets last more than a year), and unutterably delicious. They do need light, sandy soil and good drainage, so I grow them mostly in raised beds with heavily amended soil – my own heavy wet clay won’t do.
3. Blueberries. If there was ever an ornamental edible, this is it. A prettier shrub than privet or most common privacy hedge plants, it produces berries and turns as flaming red as any burning bush in the autumn. I have no idea why more people don’t landscape with blueberries. Add to that the fact that blueberries constitute a “super food.” They have more antioxidants than any single food, and are nutritional powerhouses. They do need acidic soil, but there are blueberries for all climates. Definitely worth replacing your shrubs with.
4. Amaranth – I’ve grown amaranth before, but my first year growing “Golden Giant” and “Orange” was fascinating. In two 5′x4′ beds I harvested 11.2 and 13.9 lbs of amaranth seed respectively. The plants are stunningly beautiful – 9′ tall, bright honey gold or deep orange, with green variegated leaves. The leaves are also a good vegetable cooked with garlic and sauteed, or cooked southern style. Amaranth is an easy grain crop to harvest and make use of, is delicious, can be popped like popcorn, and makes wonderful cereal. Despite its adaptation to the Southwest (where it routinely yields extremely well with minimal water), it tolerated my wet, humid climate just fine. My chickens love it too.
5. Chick peas. Unlike most beans, which must be planted after the last frost, chick peas are highly nutritious and extremely frost tolerant. Plant breeder Carol Deppe has had them overwinter in the pacific northwest, and they can be planted as early as April here, or as late as July and still mature a crop. Unlike peas and favas that don’t like hot weather, and most dry beans that don’t like cold, chick peas seem happy no matter what. If you’ve only ever eaten store chick peas, you’ll be fascinated to experience home grown ones – it is, in many ways, as big a revelation as homegrown tomatoes.
6. Beets. I know, I know, there’ s no vegetable anyone hates as much as the beet. Poor beets – they are so maligned. We should all be eating more beets – especially pregnant women, women in their childbearing years who may become pregnant, and those at risk of heart disease and stomach and colon cancer. Beets are rich in folate (which prevents birth defects) and in studies have shown enormous capacity to reduce cholesterol and blood pressure, and fight colon and stomach cancer. Beets store well, yield heavily, provide highly nutritious greens for salad and cooking and are the sweetest food in nature. If you hate beets, give them another try – consider roasting beets with salt and pepper, or steaming them and pureeing them with apples and ginger. Laurie Colwin used to swear that her recipe for beets with angel hair pasta could convert anyone into a beet lover, whereas a recipe for beets with tahini has converted many of my friends. Really, try them again!
7. Flax. You can grow this one in your flower beds, mixed in with your marigolds. Flax is usually a glorious blue – the kind of blue all flower gardeners covet. But the real reason to grow it is the seeds. Flaxseed oils are almost half omega-three fatty acids. A recent article claimed that we have no choice but to turn to GMO crops to provide essential omega threes without stripping the ocean – ignoring the fact that we can and should be growing flax everywhere, and enjoying flaxseed in our baked goods and our meals. Flax has particular value in nothern intensive gardening, which tends to be low in fats. If you grow more than you need, flaxseed is an excellent chicken feed – my poultry adore it.
8. Popcorn. If I could grow only one kind of corn, it would be popcorn, and popcorn is particularly suited to home scale gardening. There are many dwarf varieties, and many that yield well. And popcorn can be ground for flour (it is a bit of work, though, since popcorn is very hard), or popped for food. My kids like popcorn as breakfast cereal, or, of course, as a snack. Popcorn yields quite well for me in raised beds, and is always a treat at my house. It has all the merits of a whole grain, but is “accessible” to people not accustomed to eating brown rice or whole wheat – a great way to transition to a whole foods diet.
9. Kidney beans. While kidneys have lower protein levels than soy beans, they are very close to soy in total protein, and have the advantage of yielding more per acre. There are a number of pole variety kidney beans that are suitable to “three sisters” polyculture as well, so you can grow the two together. If I could grow only one dry bean (I usually grow 10 or more) it would probably be a kidney variety.
10. Rhubarb. Why rhubarb? Because it will tolerate almost any growing conditions, including part shade (most vegetables won’t), wet soil, and you jumping up and down on it and trying to get it out. Once it is established, rhubarb is tireless. It is also delicious – it does require a fair bit of sweetener (stevia, applejuice or pureed cooked beets will do if you are avoiding sugar). We like it cooked to tart-sweet for a few minutes with just a little almond extract. But its great value is that it provides fresh, nutritious, “fruity” tasting food as early as April here, and goes on as late as July, happily producing spear after spear of calcium rich, tasty food, right when you are desperate for something, anything but dandilions and lettuce. I’m in the process of converting the north side of my house to a vast rhubarb plantation (ok, not that vast), because we can never get enough of it here.
11. Turnips. Let’s say you live in an apartment, and want greens all winter, but don’t have even a south facing windowsill available. What can you do? Well, you can buy a bag of turnips from your farmer’s market. Eat some of them raw, enjoying the delicious sweet crispness of them. Shredded, they are a wonderful salad vegetable. Cook some, and mash them or roast them crisp. And take a few of the smaller turnips, and put them in a pot with some dirt on it, and stick them in a corner – east or west facing is best, but even north will work. And miraculously, using only its stored energy, the pots will go on producing delicious, nutritious turnip greens even in insufficient light. It is magic. If you do have a south facing windowsill, save it for the herbs, and put your potted turnips in the others.
12. Maximillian sunflowers. These are the perennials. They are ornamental, tall and stunning in the back of a border. They will tolerate any soil you can offer them, as long as they get full sun. They also produce oil seeds and edible roots, prevent erosion and can tolerate steep slopes, minimal water and complete and utter neglect. Don’t forget to eat them!
13. Hopi Orange Winter Squash. We all have our favorite winter squash, and perhaps you know one that I’ll like even better. But this variety has the advantage of keeping up to 18 months without softening, delicious flavor that improves in storage, and high nutritional value.
14. Annual Alfalfa. Most alfalfa is grown for forage, and it has to be grown on comparatively good, limed soil. But alfalfa is good people food too, and even a garden bed’s worth can be enormously valuable. First, of course, it is a nitrogen fixer. While you can grow perennial varieties, the annual fixes more available nitrogen, faster. It can be cut back several times as green manure during the course of a season, or you can harvest it for hay to feed your bunnies or chickens. Don’t forget to dehydrate some for tea – alfalfa is a nutritional powerhouse. And if you permit it to go to seed, the seeds make delicious sprouts and have the virtue of lasting for years. I’ve found that the annual version will make seed at the end of the season for harvest.
15. Potatoes. A few years ago I did an experiment – I threw a bit of compost on top of a section of my gravel driveway (and by “a bit” I do mean a little bit – not a garden bed’s worth but a light coating), added a sprinking of bone meal, dropped some pieces of potatoes on the ground, and covered them with mulch hay. Periodically I added a bit more and replaced the sign that said “please don’t drive on my potatoes” and in September, I harvested a reasonably good yield, given the conditions (about 30lbs from a 4′x4′ square). I did it just to confirm what people have always known – potatoes grow in places on rocky, poor soil (or no soil) that no other staple crop can handle. Don’t get me wrong – potatoes will be happier in better conditions, but potatoes can tolerate all sorts of bad situations, and come back strong. And potatoes respond better to hand cultivation than any other grain – until the 1960s hand grown, manured potatoes routinely outyielded green revolution varlieties of grains grown with chemical fertilizers. If there’s hope to feed the world, it probably lies in potatoes.
16. Sumac. No, not the poison stuff, but yes, I mean the weedy tree that grows along the roadsides here. That weedy tree, you may not realize, has many virtues. Besides its flaming fall color and value for wildlife habitat and food, sumac makes a lovely beverage. If you harvest the red fruits in July or August and soak them, you’ll get a lemony tasting beverage, as high in vitamin C as lemonjuice. Since sumac grows essentially over the entire US area that won’t support lemons, this is enormously valuable. You can can freeze or can sumac lemonade for seasoning and drinking all year round. Poison sumac has white or greenish white berries, so they are easy to tell apart. Sumac’s other value is as a restorative to damaged soil – densely planted sumac returns bare sand to fertility fairly quickly, as a University of Tennesee study shows.
17. Parsnips. If you don’t live in the northeast, or do biointensive gardening, you probably don’t eat parsnips. Me, I’m a New Englander, and the sweet, fragrant flavor of parsnips is a childhood joy. But even I hadn’t ever had a real parsnip – one left in the garden after the ground freezes for its starches to convert to sugars. Parsnips are one of the most delicious things in nature, nutritionally dense, and just about the only food you can harvest in upstate New York in February (you do have to mulch them deeply if you don’t want them frozen in the ground.
18. Potato onions. Onion seed doesn’t last very long – and that’s a worrisome thing. The truth is that if we can’t get seed easily, and we can’t grow out plants for seed easily because of some personal or environmental crisis, we might find ourselves without onions, and what a tragedy that would be. Who can cook without onions? No, we need to have onions. Which is why the perennial potato onions, that simply stay in the ground and are pulled and replanted are so enormously valuable – good tasting, put them where you want them, pull up what you need and ignore the rest. They’ll give you scallions before you could get them any other way, and will provide a decent supply of small, but storable and delicious onions.
19. King Stropharia Mushrooms (aka winecaps) – Mushrooms have complex nutritional values, and offer soil improving benefits. The King Stropharia has the advantage of growing well in wood chip mulch in your garden, having few poisonous cognates (ie, you are unlikely to kill yourself harvesting it, tastes great, and is a natural nematodacidal. They give you something meaty and tasty from your garden and can actually improve total yields in a given space. If you fear fungi, this is an easy one to start with.
20. Filberts/Hazelnuts – The best small space nuts, it has an astounding range and and various varities tolerate quite a number of soils. The nuts are delicious, it is fairly easy to grow and the yields are generally high. In cold climates, oil rich plants can be hard to come by – this is a useful exception Oh, and if you have chocolate, you can make that basic food staple, nutella 
.
21. Elderberries. Got a wet spot? What doesn’t care if it has wet feet, has virocidal qualities, incredible vitamin C value, delicious and nutritious flowers, grows like a weed, is ornamental and will feed the birds anything you don’t want. Yup, the remarkable elder. What’s not to love?
22. Sunflowers – Our local dairy farmers sometimes alternate cow corn with sunflowers as a winter feed. There is truly no more beautiful edible crop in the world than a field full of glowing sunflowers in late summer. They would be valuable enough if they didn’t produce delicious food, high in vitamin E and a host of trace minerals, food for the birds, and stalks that when dry burn extremely well and hot in your woodstove.
23. Rice. In India, nearly half of all rice comes from the gardens of those who farm less than 5 acres – often from home plots of much less than that. This is true over much of Asia – the staple food of their population is often grown in what we’d consider garden sized plots – and the aggregate feeds a population. While the far northermost growers may struggle with this, rice is one of the few staple grains totally amenable to home scale cultivation, and if you can grow rice, you might want to consider it. It is a nearly univeral staple – studies have found that rice allergy essentially does not exist. While growing and harvesting rice on a home scale is some work (some cultures call it “the tyrant with a soul”), rice is worth the time and energy for many of us.
24. Jerusalem artichokes – I know, duh. Sweet and tasty, crisp and nutty, perennials who will take over your house if you let them – what’s not to love? Those who worry that the bad guys are coming to take their food can plant these in their flower beds without fear that most people will recognize them as anything other than something pretty. When first harvested, the carbohydrates are in the form of inulin so that diabetics can eat pretty freely of these.
25. Kale/Collards. They don’t mind heat – 100 degree days don’t phase them once they are mature. They grow all summer, north or south. They don’t mind cold – some strains will overwinter uncovered here in icy upstate NY, while almost all will overwinter covered. They are nutritionally dense, great cooked, or raw in the baby stage. In the cold, their starches turn to sugar. Stir fry them with oyster sauce, steam them and toss them in vinagrette, cook them with bacon dressing – it doesn’t really matter, they are universally good.
Sharon
- agriculture , garden design
- Comments(45)
ayayay – poor deprived americans…
don’t like beets
ROTFL
Borsch I tell you !!!
beet salad ( grated cooked beets, mayo(or olive oil), garlic, salt, walnuts, maybe a little vinegar) mmmmm….
NOTHING but NOTHING deals a total defeat to constipation like beets do.
sorry … laughing too hard…
one thing to realize for people who did not grow up eating beets (or caviar :p ) – there are quite a large variance in flavor – some beets I just don’t like – they have a “too earthy” flavor, some have too little flavor, some not sweet enough etc. etc.
but good beets, prepared right – delicious
So before you dismiss it – find some Ukrainian who’s mom can/could cook and have them taste/pick/cook things with you, otherwise you will never know what you missed.
Oh… and before anybody says “Yuck – I tried borsch … or whatever” – I tell you – “Me too” – I’ve tried some which would give a bad name to anything. But when my grandma made it – mmm… the sweetness, the complexity… the beef :p
the memories.
TJ
I’ve been looking for chick pea and flax seed sources and haven’t found any that actually are in stock. I’ve thought about resorting to buying “sprouting seeds” just to have them on hand, but I don’t know how they’d do in my climate. Anybody have suggestions on where to get these for growing?
http://www.seedsofchange.com sells both, as does http://www.bountifulgardens.com.
Sharon
Fantastic suggestions, Sharon — thanks! I’ve spent a lot of time lately researching the best crops to grow in my backyard, but never thought about sumac or potato onions (never even heard of them) before.
Here’s a tip for people who think they’re beet-haters, by the way: sliced thin, tossed with olive oil and lightly salted, they make very tasty and nutritious chips. Just pop a plate into the microwave and zap at full power for 3-ish minutes (keep an eye on them, though: once they’re fully crisp, they go black — or even ignite! — quickly).
Everything I’ve read about chickpeas has made me reluctant to try them. Mostly because anything that takes longer than 90 days to maturity is courting disaster. Also soils here don’t typically get above 55 degrees even in raised beds so germination takes that much longer. I’d love to grow chickpeas because I love them about as much as I love lentils (something else I can’t really grow here either). There are other vegie/grain/pulses I’m going to try first.
Kerri in AK
Great suggestions and I’m happy to say that I already do many of them. As for beets, I adore them and after harvesting some tiny one, slicing thinly and putting them in the kids’ salads, they shockingly reported that they also liked them. Go figure.
How do you dehull your rice? I tried using a converted Corona grain mill (Google “Corona Grain Mill Dehuller Instructions” and go to the Southern Exposure site for directions on how to build one). But the Corona dehuller broke most of the grains and the rest weren’t dehulled very well. The rice I used was short grain, which this mill is supposed to be able to dehull. Do you know of a better mill for dehulling rice? One of the things we need most is some small-scale mills for handling our grains post-harvest.
I actually make a beet salad with raw beets. I order to not dye all my clothes I use a food processor to grate them.
+1 BEETS!! Good in a wide, wide variety of dishes and salads. this has been a borscht winter for me and I haven’t gotten tired of the taste.
I also want to put in a word for runner beans — easy to save, grow, dry, shell, store, and cook. Stunning flavor baked. Everyone I know that has them is using them just as flowers — without even taking the beans! I cannot fathom this …
Just wondering how you process the buckwheat? Do you just run it through a grain mill or is something further required to remove the kernels?
Can rhubarb survive in the American SE? I’d love to plant some in a semi shady area just outside Atlanta but I’m having a hard time finding info on heat tolerance and need for chilling. We’re basically a zone 8 (although we were 7 on the older USDA maps).
I’m also interested in the statement that Amaranth is easy to harvest. I have heard elsewhere that it is a pain to harvest; small grains that don’t want to come off. How do you do it?
Excellent list, with a number of plants i’ve not tried growing before.
Is there a botanical name for the Sumac tree??
Rice, hmmm, sounds challenging, can you recommend any links/text on how to get started?
Michelle
Small scale grain and pulse production: a forum for information exchange on grain and pulse production for food.
http://grainsandpulses.blogspot.com/
Poppies are easy to grow and its easy to harvest/clean poppy seed.
Corn.
Garlic, too!
Yum! but at least until summer I’m stuck in an apartment without even a balcony – any thoughts on what will grow in indoor containers for real food? Can I grow chickpeas?
All the container gardening books assume a balcony at minimum, and usually focus on ornamentals.
Great list Sharon, thanks. We have had some success growing sunflowers, but getting the hulls off them has defeated us so far.
When we do smash our way in the seeds are either very small or mashed to a pulp.
What’s the secret?
Good list Sharon!
A couple of things -first, sweet potatoes grow just fine in clay soils down here. My soil is stony clay and I get a good sweet potato crop every year. Second, I don’t think rhubarb grows well down here but that’s okay -by the end of April, we have strawberries coming in, and they are heaven on earth.
Jen, unless your windows have a lot of sun, you’d have a tough time growing chickpeas – greens and herbs are probably the easiest indoor plants. You can sprout chickpeas, though.
Rebecca, I suspect that in less marginal conditions, sweet potatoes are less fussy – up here where the nights are cool even in July (high 40s occasionally, low 50s pretty consistently) they need more optimized conditions.
Earl, I mostly bite them off – but that only works for one by one eating, which is my favorite way.
intj, rhubarb looks like a 3-7 plant, so I don’t know. If you had a cool spot, you could try it.
Sharon
2. Sweet Potatoes: I tried them for the 1st time last year, and was pleasantly surprised how easy they are to grow. Plant them in a bed of their own, the vines will be prolific (and choke out weeds). They store well, too.
6. Beets: I’ve always grown Lutz Green Leaf/Winter Keeper, as did my Father-in-Law who introduced me to the variety. These will get very large, but maintain their sweetness and tenderness. They will keep in the garden quite a while into the fall. I pull mine before the ground freezes and store in moist sand in a 5-gal barrel; I used some to make borscht last week.
13. I’ve had good results with Waltham Butternut, that is one of my “old reliable” varieties. I don’t know about 18 months, but we still have a bunch in storage that were harvested before 1st frost, and they should still be OK for several more months.
17. I grow parsnips, they can be left in the garden under heavy mulch to winter over. However, there is a trick to growing them: you MUST presoak the seed for a few days before planting! You must also plant in very loose, fine, weed free soil, and keep it moist – these seeds are VERY SLOW to germinate! My favorite recipe to use them I call Sausage & Roots: slice parsnips, rutabaga, carrots & potatoes, saute in a little oil, slice smoked sausage and add to saute until cooked.
24. Sunchokes (what I call them): Planted them last year in a dedicated raised bed. Very easy to grow, they overwinter well, harvested and ate some last week. Slice and saute – delicious! For sale at our local grocery for $7.99/lb!!!
25. The proper (Southern!) way to cook collards (learned by a former Northerner!):
a) get some bits of ham or salt pork boiling in some water in a pot
b) Strip the stalk out from the middle of each leaf
c) stack the leaves up, roll up, and cut across to create a bunch of thin strips
d) add these to the water and boil until tender
Sharon,
Blueberries need acid soil…I want them, but I’d have to grow them in immense pots or something, as the soil here is as alkaline as the day is short.
Does Stropharia come in an indoor “mushroom log”? I can’t grow mushrooms in an area like this.
For everyone’s info, the Californian native *lemonadeberry* is a sumac which grows well here.
And what is a buckwheat variety which will grow out here? It sounds nice.
I need to turn the soil over in my wafflebeds and plant clover. It can only help.
Jim
The link for Bountiful Gardens leads to a Domain Name “squatting” site. Have they gone out of business? Great article by the way. I tried beet greens last summer and was pleasantly surprised. I then cooked the beets and found them delicious too. It has taken me 35 years to overcome the stigma aquired as a youth.
They have found a place in my garden! I am looking forward to trying the other’s that you have mentioned also.
I want to plant them all!!!!-whether suitable for my area or not.
At least I read the “corn” post first-maybe I’ll choose 2 or 3.
Sigh…being sensible is sort of boring. But it will probably have much better results than my usual ‘plant everything, everywhere, forget half, and have benign neglect for the rest’. Which is just plain frustrating.
Thanks Sharon!
Here’s the correct link for BG: http://www.bountifulgardens.org/default.asp
Tangentially related to what to grow (I’ve printed this out & highlighted things I’m going to try this year, thank you)
We have so much produce dropping off trees in our California neighborhood, it’s sickening. There are groups around that come and glean and give the harvest to the food pantry or senior centers.
I am wondering about a community event that could be held at a church kitchen in which people bring in excess produce and can it together. For instance, when the plums are piling up around the neighborhood, have a plum jam-making party. People who know how to can and have the equipment could lead the party; people who don’t, but do have plums, could contribute produce and labor. Everbyody else contributes labor natch. The results could be distributed among the people at the event; or donated to the church for sale at the next bazaar; or donated to the food pantry/senior center.
Benefits – learn canning and jam-making skills; meet the neighbors; keep fruit and other produce out of the compost pile/garbage.
A pastor in my area has a blog and is interested in sustainable urban living etc. so I have suggested this to him; waiting for an answer. Since I live in the Bay Area, my local gleaning possibilities include olives, figs, persimmons, lemons, oranges, loquats, plums, pears, apples, rosemary, lavender, nasturtium, mint and prickly pear cactus (nopales). Oh yes, and my neighbor’s neighbor has a large black walnut tree that they all neglect. I forgot to go try to harvest from it this year (was busy recovering from chemo). Free walnuts? Free olives? Bring on the zombies, I’m going to eat well.
Hey intj
I don’t know about other Amaranth varieties but Pygmy Torch is easy to harvest. I just beat the plant over a wide shallow contain. Then you shake the seeds around and blow on them to get rid of the chaff. And the assorted spiders, beetles, and other wildlife that fell off the plant
Mostly I agreed with your list. Personally I don’t like beets, but the DH does, so I grow the Lutz/Winterkeeper variety for him. For me, I’d substitute Black Spanish Round or Red Meat radish for them – nutrition like other cabbage-family crops, easy to grow as long as you plant after midsummer, they get as big or bigger and store as well as the beet, and I like them much better.
I’m real surprised you didn’t include garlic in your must-grow list. It’s the one crop I have grown enough of for years that we never have to buy it – and we think food isn’t food unless it includes garlic. Not to mention its medicinal value. It’s grown similarly to potato onions, which BTW I grow as well. Much easier to handle than standard onions. You could have included the topsetting onion too. We use it for green onions in spring and fall. Plant the topsets in early fall or early spring for green onions, and keep a mother patch of bulbs to produce the topsets, and you’re all set.
Two other things I’m surprised you didn’t include: asparagus and lambsquarters. I’ll eat asparagus over rhubarb any day. Like rhubarb, asparagus is ready long before anything else in the open garden, and you can eat asparagus for weeks longer than most crops once the plants are established. As for lambsquarters, you actually called them a “weed” in one of your other posts. Lambsquarters are food in this house! Eat them raw, stir-fried, cooked like greens; dry them and add them to winter meals … as nutritious as spinach, far easier to grow in my warm-summer climate (spinach goes to seed by mid-May), usable all summer long, better-tasting than spinach IMHO, and it plants itself. Plus I understand the seeds are edible, though I haven’t tried eating them yet.
Im hoping you might be able to help me out. Just how do you process corn to flour? Ive seem different things mentioned including soaking, mild acid, nothing, etc. So any help you could provide would be great. Come to think of it, a post about processing various grains might be a thought.
Thanks
Hi Sharon!
Great article! With your permission, I would like to “Guest Article” your “25 best… on my Blog.
I would of course give you complete attribution and a link back to your blog. I use Blogspot and I’m not sure how to put in links yet if you would like to exchange links. But I will try to find out. I like other peoples Blogs on Gardening that are Really useful as well as frendly and fun. Let me know please.
Bob
GrandBob
http://GrandBobsGarden.Blogspot.com
Go ahead, Grandbob!
Sharon
Great suggestions. I’ll second amaranth. We eat it as porridge about once a week or so and for a lark I planted some of the seeds from one of the store-bought bags. We had a carpet of it growing within a couple weeks and got about 9 lbs of seed after thinning cuts for greens.
We love the suggestion for the kale but how do you keep kosher and eat bacon dressing?
Great suggestions. I’m looking for something I can dry and toss in oatmeal to replace raisins. Elderberries sound like they might work, but the catalogs aren’t very informative. Do the berries have seeds? Pits? Do they dry well? What do they taste like? (Chokecherries are named for their flavor.) What I’d like to do is eat a few fresh and have a handful of dried to toss in cereal and see how they work.
NY Yankee – I don’t eat bacon dressing
. But I know it exists, and I don’t have a problem mentioning it on the blog for those that do.
Sharon
With regard to growing plums, I live in northern France, in an area with about 40 inches of rain a year and really heavy wet clay soils. This was traditionally a plum-growing area; there are many old plum orchards around here. Perry pear trees also seem to do well. Anyone thinking of growing plums should bear in mind that they like a really cold winter.
Duh, sorry, I should have put the above comment against the posting on water.
Wow this is a great post, and great comments following. I was happy to find a lot of my planned additions/experiments this year in your list, including beets, (I’m kinda going nuts with a bigger garden–bye-bye lawn–so it should be full of surprises!). Thanks for including the ornamental and functional qualities of the plants as well.
For those who find traditional red beets too intense, golden or yellow beets are milder in taste and color.
The garden mushrooms look interesting…I think we’ll try them this year.
Quigs – I grind corn for cornmeal/flour in my Jupiter grain mill. I first grind it very coarse (so I won’t break the mill) and then grind it again at a finer setting. It works great.
Mary Campbell – I have made raisins from grapes (using my dehydrator). The sweeter the grapes, the more they will be like commercial raisins. They also need to be seedless. I just planted some Interlaken Seedless grapes last fall, which are a cross between Thompson Seedless (the kind used for most commercial raisins) and a northern variety for winter hardiness. I got them from Miller Nurseries in NY http://www.millernurseries.com
Elise
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[...] http://sharonastyk.com/2009/02/10/20-plants-you-should-consider-growing/ [...]
[...] Flax: because Sharon said so (for good reasons, which are now also [...]
[...] was intrigued by this article that has a great list of plants to grow which can meet most if not all of our nutritional needs. [...]
Thank you so much for this post. So much inspiration. I’m going for allergy shots this year, hoping I can get back to gardening, My FIL is establishing raised beds in our backyard this year.
I learned to love beets last summer – including the greens! – when visiting local farmers markets. Got my sister hooked too. Just roasting them with olive oil and salt and pepper is fantastic.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had them in months and miss then tremendously. Store-bought beets are junk. Made them once, my sister and I gagged, and they went into the garbage. No wonder people think they don’t like beets.
THanks so much. What a wonderful post.
[...] a precious link By southernrata From my American Idol, Sharon, 25 plants worth growing. 25 paragraphs of [...]
[...] http://sharonastyk.com/2009/02/10/20-plants-you-should-consider-growing/ [...]
Kengan Water SHould Change your water exchange your life. my office offer everyone who would take it free water for a month and in that time you will see your body quit suffering and moe back to what God intended for it to be.
thanks you for wiriting a fantastic post i think i will subscribe to your rss feed.