What Should You Plant in Your Garden This Year?
It’s late spring early summer, and you’re getting seed catalogs in the mail. You’re pondering whether to dig up a bit of land and add a vegetable garden to your very own sweet piece of Gunnison County real estate. But what to plant?
Well, it really depends on what you want. That sounds simplistic, but think about it. What do you want from your vegetable garden? Are you looking to supplement your diet? Do you just adore crunchy, fresh veggies and want to have them as close as your doorstep? Or are you a wannabe farmer who just loves the idea of telling your local grocery store to stuff it; you’ll do just fine on your own, thank you very much?
If it’s freshness as near as your back yard that you want, you might do well with a simple salad garden augmented by a few snow peas, some string beans and tomatoes. With salad greens and peas, you can start early, as soon as the frost starts to come out of the ground. Tomatoes are less tolerant and need to be put in when the ground is warm. With just a few seeds and a small area of tilled soil (enhanced with a quality fertilizer), you can get growing quickly and enjoy fresh produce well into early fall.
Perhaps you’re horrified at the price you have to pay for veggies at the supermarket, and you’d like to store a bit for the winter. Beans, peas, squash and tomatoes all lend themselves well to canning or freezing, and you can save a bundle on your grocery bill during the winter.
Whatever your purpose, the main thing to remember is, if you don’t like it, don’t plant it. Spinach, for example, will grow like crazy and just a few plants will feed you all summer long and leave you plenty left over to freeze or can. But if you’re not all that fond of spinach, it won’t do you much good if you just leave it in the garden to bolt and go to seed.
Gardens are great fun, so feel free to experiment. Oh, and if you live in an apartment, all is not lost – many nice little kitchen gardens have been grown in containers.
Sources:
http://www.moneycrashers.com/how-to-save-money-with-a-home-garden/