Strategies For Choosing Vegetables

Food prices rise. Concern about food safety heightens. Transporting food long distances affects global warming. Knowing how good fresh vegetables taste, man of us seek solutions. Even with only small spaces, we can grow some of our own produce. Perusing seed catalogs is a good way to start your shopping. Keep in mind the vegetables you and your family enjoy eating. "Container Gardening" sections often offer appropriate selections. Sees featured in these sections are from plants that have been chosen to have small statures that will grow in pots or tuck into small, sunny spaces in your yard. Many times the fruits of these varieties are smaller, more tender, and more flavorful. Because the fruits are smaller, the plants produce fruit more quickly, allowing a longer period of production. With our shore summers this is an added boon to us vegetable starved folks. If you pick and use the vegetables continuously, the plant will continue to produce. (The purpose of a plant is to reproduce itself, once it sets seed, it thinks its lifework is done and stops producing its fruit!

Clue words in your search for appropriate choices are dwarf, midget, and bush. These are indicator words, but you still must read the full descriptions to really know how large the plants will grow. Your idea of dwarf may not be the same as the seed company's! "Bush" is one of the nebulous clue words that can be very different in the eyes of the beholder. Read carefully, know your space limitations, and look at the label for the "mature" plant size.

"Baby" greens that you find in the grocery stores are not from mini plants; they are leaves picked at an immature stage. This is one way that you can grow "micro" greens at home. When you pick leaves of lettuces, mustards, or beets when they are tiny and continue to do so on a regular basis, the root structure of the plant will also remain small. You can easily grow them in pots. The small carrots we get in groceries are often large carrots that have been cut and shaved to make petite-looking vegetables. There are carrot varieties, however, that do grow only 4 or 5 inches long. Seedling peas can be grown in pots for tasty additions to salads. Select a snow pea variety; plant a dozen or so seeds to a pot, and harvest shoots for a long period of time. You may even get some small pods in the bargain.

You can grow pole beans and snap peas on fences or staked in pots. Choose tomatoes labeled "determinate", ones that stop their vegetative growth at a certain and then just produce fruit. Stake them to save space.

Another tip when you do this type of gardening is to choose small seed packages sizes as most seeds do not remain viable for long periods of time.

At nurseries ask what the mature size of any plant will be. Making good choices can save money and space, can avoid disappointments, and can provide the pleasure of enjoying fresh vegetables.

Cathy Peck

Beltrami County Master Gardener