Now that you've all learned, I'm sure, to appreciate one another's differences and be civil to each other, I'd like to open up my backyard to you, O my brothers and sisters, and hopefully teach you a few useful things about backyard gardening.
Those of you who garden can swap tips with one another in the comments, and for those of you who have never gardened but might be interested in starting, I wanted to share this: I have only been gardening for three seasons now. Indeed, some of the pics I have to show are from my first-ever garden.
Despite my lack of experience, I have grown: tomatoes (7 varieties), peppers (hot and sweet), strawberries, cucumbers, lettuce, raspberries, blueberries, sunflowers, dill, sage, cilantro, parsley, oregano, basil, rosemary, lavender, thyme, chamomile, chives, mint, and about a dozen types of flowers. That's just the crops that come to mind. I've transplanted, composted, weeded, cultivated, irrigated, grown from seed, direct sowed, planted bulbs and transferred plants.
It's easy, and it's fun. Even if you've killed a cactus with neglect or overattention (I have), you can still become a successful gardener.
A note about soil: One thing you'll quickly find about gardening is that everyone has their own tips. From old ladies to young fellas like myself, everyone has advice on the thing you simply must do to grow the best plants.
I'm not going to bombard you with such tips. But what I will say is that if you take good care of your soil, it will take good care of you. You'll hear a lot of talk about soil composition and pH and taking a mason jar to your local co-op so they can analyze your soil. But the main thing for me has always been compost, compost, compost. Introduce more organic material into your soil, and your plants will always have what they need -- nutrients, moisture, aeration, and good soil health.
I could write a whole other diary on home composting, but I'll spare you that for the moment. If you want to hear more, see this comment of mine.
What I'm going to go over today are some good basic crops for the "kitchen garden." You can grow these in a limited area of space, like you'd find in the average suburban backyard. You can also grow them in boxes or containers, for those of you who are condo- or apartment-dwellers.
Also, this should go without saying, but what works for me may not necessarily work for you. My area of Oklahoma is in Zone 6. So crops I haven't had much luck with, like strawberries for example, might work better for you. And crops that work well for me might be hard for you to grow. I tried to focus on plants that grow well in most places.
First up, basil!
Ah, basil. Although Asinus Asinum Fricat and I disagree on this, I think basil is the king of herbs. It's tasty, has a multitude of uses, is easy to grow, and seeds itself easily as an annual. It seeds itself so easily that I haven't had to buy any basil plants since my first year of growing.
You can grow basil easily in containers. Just pluck the individual leaves and rinse and chop for use in the kitchen. Add basil leaves to a container of olive oil to give your cooking oil a tasty kick. Basil is great for bruchetta, pasta sauces, salads or sandwiches. When adding basil as a herb, add it to your dish shortly before serving so the flavor doesn't cook out.
Basil likes sunlight, and hates cold. Don't plant it too early or it will die. Don't freeze fresh basil leaves, either, or they turn to black jelly. At the peak of the summer, your basil will start growing seedheads with tiny pinkish white flowers. You can pinch these off to maintain the flavor of the leaves. Eventually though the seedheads will sprout and your basil will lose its flavor. So sad. But you can dry the leaves if you wish to enjoy the flavor outside the growing season.
Next up, peppers!
Pictured is a red cayenne pepper plant, one of my first-ever crops. The little off-white flower you see me holding eventually became a skinny, bright-red pepper. There are a huge variety of pepper plants to try.There's hot peppers, like cayenne, jalapeno, ancho, habenero and others, and sweet peppers like bell, banana, cherry and others. There's even tiny ornamental peppers, and the bachelorette party favorite, the peter pepper.
I like to grow peppers by transplant, but I hear starting them from seed is pretty simple as long as you shield them from cold. Peppers, like basil, are warm-weather plants. Also, keep their soil moist, but not soaking wet.
When your peppers are ripe, harvest them as soon as they are ready to promote more fruit growth. You can eat them raw or sun-dry hot peppers, such as cayenne. Some people say allowing your pepper plant to dry out a bit before you harvest hot peppers boosts the level of capsaicin (the chemical that gives peppers their heat), but that may be an advanced tip, and I want to keep it simple.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you how many different ways you can cook and serve peppers. They're great for salsas, hot sauces, salads, stir-fry, burritos, omelettes and anything else that needs some extra crunch or spice. The spice known as paprika is really just dried, ground red bell pepper. You can remove the heat from a hot pepper by cutting out the seeds and the white inner parts of the fruit. All peppers contain a whopping amount of vitamin C, even more than citrus fruits in some cases.
Up next, sunflowers!
These are little baby sunflower sprouts in my garden. I stuck 25 seeds into the ground and got 25 flowers, sure enough. It's a foolproof plant to grow from seed. And I liked it because it produced food as well as being pretty to look at.
As you can see from the photo, sunflowers follow the sun. This is called heliotropism, for all you geeks out there. The plants grow quickly in the hot spring and summer, and will likely get even taller than you, unless you're growing dwarf sunflowers or are extremely tall.
The heavy flower heads and relatively shallow roots can send some sunflowers toppling over in heavy winds. If you want to keep them more secure, you can stake the plants. Another benefit of sunflowers is the seeds attract birds to your yard. This can be good, unless you get a bunch of pushy crows and squirrels instead.
Once the seeds form and loosen up a bit, you can harvest them from the head. Or you can simply chop of the head, soak it in brine and roast it in the oven whole. Check the Internet for sunflower seed recipes.
Next we have German chamomile!
That little guy with the flowers showing in the back, behind the oregano, is German chamomile. It's absolutely my favorite plant that I grow every spring. It's simple to grow, seeds itself easily, provides you with the best herbal tea you'll ever taste, and its mere presence seems to give all the other plants around it a boost. For this reason some gardeners call chamomile the "doctor plant." Some have even been known to sprinkle their entire garden with a weak chamomile tea to encourage more robust growth from underperforming plants.
The part of the plant you want to make tea out of are the flowers. Just pluck them off with your bare hands and then stick them into a tea ball before steeping them until you get the strength you like. You'll never go back to the storebought kind. German chamomile is one other plant that I've only had to buy one time. Since then it's popped up all over my garden, and even in my yard. It will grow anywhere, seemingly.
And finally, we have tomatoes!
Here we have a couple of varieties of tomato plants ready for transplant into my garden. Starting tomatoes can seem overwhelming. There is a huge variety of hybrids, heirlooms and specialized varieties. But there are really only just a few basic kinds of tomatoes: the slicing tomato (aka: beefsteak), the salad tomato (cherry, grape, etc.) and the paste tomato (Roma, etc.).
For your first time growing tomatoes, I recommend picking either a beefsteak and/or a cherry type tomato. Both are good introductions. When you transplant your tomatoes, dig a deep hole. Maybe almost a foot for a plant as big as the one pictured above. Those tiny hairs you see along the tomato's stem will turn into roots once they are buried. Burying as much as 2/3 of your plant gives it a bit of a head start.
Compost is crucial for tomatoes. They have to have soil with plenty of organic material mixed in, as well as plenty of water. Some people have been known to bury their tomato transplants with a couple banana peels. I haven't tried this, but there are a lot of banana peels in my compost, and I always have more tomatoes than I can eat or give away.
When your plants double in size, you might consider staking or caging your tomatoes to keep them propped up off the ground.This prevents foliar diseases on your leaves and makes picking the fruit easier as well. If you don't stake or cage, your tomato plants will sprawl out and take up twice as much room as they have to.
Tomatoes grow well in containers, but container tomatoes are less forgiving than tomatoes planted in the ground with you when it comes to water, so be sure they have moist soil all the time. The best tomatoes I ever had were grown in a flood year here in Oklahoma, so while I'm sure it's possible to drown a tomato plant, I never have.
Unless you're making fried green tomatoes, pick your fruit when they are red (assuming you're growing a red variety). I find that refrigerating my tomatoes robs them of their flavor, so try to eat them right away, or learn how to dry or can them.
That's me with my expert weed-puller. He eats a lot of what he pulls, though.
Well, that's about all I have to offer today. All the plants I've gone over with you are ones I've had a lot of success with and would recommend to beginners. I would also highly recommend oregano, parsley, rosemary, lettuce, cucumbers, sage and thyme.
If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them in the comments. But feel free to swap tips and tricks with each other.