Jessie, Jessie, always messy,
how does your garden grow?
With heirloom tomatoes and sweet potatoes
and Swiss chard all in a row.
But really, how should our garden grow? This weekend the hubs and I snuck a peek at the veggies that Lowes, Home Depot, and our local nursery had growing (while we were out pricing dirt for the raised garden). We were stunned with the number of options. Heirloom. Hybrid. Organic. Early yielding. Heavy yielding. Heat tolerant. All week we’ve been trying to figure out just what we want to plant this weekend.
We know we want tomatoes. We both love them. Ideally, we’d love to have a juicing variety so that we can replenish our stock of home-canned tomato juice (which is running dangerously low) and a salad variety that we can enjoy right out of the garden. Growing up, both our dads swore by Better Boy Hybrids. Kevin and I would both like to try to grow some heirloom tomatoes, and a friend suggested that cherries grow great here. It’s a classic case of too many options.
We also know we want to plant beets and pickling cucumbers. We both love pickled beets and dill pickles (and I love beets roasted and thrown on a salad with a little goat cheese and balsamic vinaigrette). Again, our dads always went with the same beet, the classic Detroit Red. There are a lot of heirloom beet options though, so we don’t really know what to plant here either.
Other than those three veggies, we have no idea what we want to plant. There’s really nothing we don’t like, but therein lies our problem: we want to plant everything.
What veggies can you not live without? What would you suggest we plant in our garden? Should we go completely heirloom or include some hybrids?
Little House. Big Heart. 