Our pile of compost has arrived, so this weekend we are going to prep the soil of the Grow It Yourself garden, build a border around it with bricks, put up a bean trellis, and then get some seed and plants in the ground. We visited the nursery this week and our fresh new box of plants is waiting patiently. So go pick up your seed and plants today and have them ready to go in! Not sure what to get or how to pick out a decent plant?
Good thing you’re here.
If you’re growing the same plants in your garden as we are:
Tomatoes, Lettuce, Green Onions, Potatoes, and Pole Beans
Basil, Chives, Oregano, Thyme, and Parsley
Buy these as plants: Tomatoes, Basil, Chives, Oregano, Thyme, Parsley, some lettuce
Buy these as seed: Lettuce, Pole Beans, Potatoes (the seed is an actual potato, by the way), and Onions, which are sold as “onion sets” in bags like so:
Photo by www.eatseasonally.com.
The reason we’re getting lettuce plants AND lettuce seed is that we want to have lettuce right away, but since it also grows from seed really fast, we’ll keep seeding more throughout the spring and summer.
By the way, if it was March we would show you how to start some of these seeds yourself indoors. But it is almost May and the time for doing this has, sadly, passed. There is simply not enough time for them to grow big enough inside and then reach maturity before the fall chill sets in. But there’s always next year! Grow It Yourself Season Two will show you how to start seeds indoors. It’s good fun and can save some money.
HOW TO CHOOSE SEED
Make no mistake: this is what you’re going to be faced with at the garden store.
In the face of so many different kinds of beets, it is important to remain calm. But hey wait, we’re not even growing beets in the garden! That’s one hurdle cleared.
As my dad always says, it’s the decisions that kill you.
What’s a girl to do?
Not to get all preachy or anything, but we suggest you get yourself to a garden center, nursery, or other seed seller that is not a Great. Big. Chain. These places have seed that is cheap, but unless they have a really good seed buyer, they often don’t carry the best or most interesting varieties (cultivars, types, strains) for your particular growing area. They usually carry what is grown in huge quantities and might grow well enough no matter where you live but they don’t necessarily produce the tastiest vegetables. So to these big boxes we say, “Do not insult me, sir!” and then turn on our heel and buy from nurseries that stock seeds that are well-suited to our climate, and perhaps are rare, heirloom, or just plain interesting.
Calypso Bean, also known as Orca or Yin Yang Bean. Photo by Seed Savers Exchange.
The good news is that a good seed buyer at a good nursery knows what grows best in your area and has selected seeds that will do well. So if it’s there and you’re standing there looking at it, it’s probably going to work and be downright tasty.
So how do you choose between the 26 different kinds of lettuce you’re staring at? Just think about what kind of lettuce you like to eat - romaine? loose leaf? butterhead? Maybe you want to grow some of each - that’s what we’re going to do. We will plant 4 blocks of lettuce, each one a different kind and color. One is a red loose leaf lettuce, one is a green romaine, one is an reddish brown oak leaf lettuce, and another is a mixture of red and green loose leaf. It’s going to look really great and it is nice to have a salad with many different colors, shapes, and textures.
In short, variety is good fun, so mix it up.
How much lettuce seed do I need to get? One pack of each kind of lettuce will be lots. Even if you just want to grow one kind of lettuce, one pack should be good for a small garden.
As for the onions, we picked red onion sets just because these grow kinda prettier onions, we think. The taste will not be all that different from a yellow or white onion though, so you decide. Look for these onion sets in bags - sometimes they are kept near the vegetable seeds or flower bulbs inside the nursery. Note: all a green onion is, is an immature onion. You’re just picking a regular onion early.
How many onions? 1 bag will do you.
When you’re choosing Pole Beans, look at the seed pack carefully to make sure you are actually getting a pole bean (that climbs high up a trellis) and not a bush bean, which only gets a couple of feet tall. It should clearly say ‘Pole Bean’ on the package. We are growing a pole bean called ‘Bingo‘. We are also growing a ‘Runner Bean’ - another kind of pole bean. If you see one, grab it! Runner beans, or Scarlet Runner Beans, produce gorgeous red flowers that attract hummingbirds and they produce lovely dried beans too. A great variety is ‘Scarlet Emperor’. We have grown that one for years, so we’re trying something new this year - Golden Sunshine:
Copyright Territorial Seed Company.
How many beans? One pack of each kind will do. If you want to give your bean harvest a boost, it is also a good idea to get a package of legume inoculant. It’s a bit spendy ($6-ish) but worth it - you’ll get way more beans. Ask a friendly nursery staff member if they have it. One little bag will do. (We’ll show you how to use it.)
Potatoes will probably be sold in bins outside. We like to eat different kinds, so we got fingerlings (Rose Finn Apple), yellows (Yukon Gold), and reds (hmm, forget). These will mature at slightly different times and some keep better over winter (reds). Fingerlings are perfect for fresh eating - well, they all are. (Remember that you won’t have loads to store from a couple of rows in a small garden, but you might have some if you don’t eat them all up this summer!)
HOW TO CHOOSE PLANTS
Before you do anything, you need to figure out how many plants to buy. To do this, you need to know how much room different plants need and, therefore, how many your garden can hold.
Here’s how it breaks down:
Tomatoes: reach 2′ across and should be planted 3′ to 4′ apart.
Lettuce: 8″ to 12″. Plant every 4″ to 6″.
Potatoes: Grow to 2 feet or more. Plant every 16″ or so.
Green Onions: Skinny. Plant every 1 to 2 inches.
Pole Beans: These grow vertically and wind around a trellis. Plant every 1 to 2 inches.
Violas: Reach 6 to 8 inches, plant here and there.
Marigolds: Reach 1 foot across, sometimes more. Scatter around tomatoes and basil, staying 2 feet away from tomatoes and a foot or more away from basil.
Oregano: About 8 inches to a foot at maturity.
Thyme: 6 to 8 inches at maturity
Basil: Reaches 1 foot across
Chives: Allow 8 inches to a foot between clumps
Now, to figure out how many plants to get, go out to your garden, narrow your eyes, and slowly walk the perimeter. Assess the situation. Either grab a stick and mark out in the dirt where the plants will go, or just eyeball it, imagine it, or take a deep breath and a wild guess. Write it down in your trusty pocket notebook. If you overestimate, don’t worry about it - you can always move stuff to a pot, or eat more. Vegetables are good for you, eh. If you underestimate, just go get some more. Figuring out how plants grow and how much your garden can pack in is a learning process - trial and error is a way of life for gardening types like us. (More tips on spacing to come though. Read on…)
Good rules of thumb when choosing vegetable plants, or plants of any kind for that matter:
The plant should look healthy. It’s standing up straight, sturdy, and proud. It has good color (not yellow or sickly or spotted), it seems like it’s the right size for its pot (its roots aren’t plunging out the bottom, or it looks like it’s too big and about to escape). It looks like you want to eat it.
Avoid: Floppy, yellowing, sprawling, too big for their britches plants.
Let’s go down our list of plants we need to buy:
Some good lookin’ lettuce:
It is stout, not sprawly, the color is lovely, and it just looks like it would be crunchy and tasty. Pick something like this.
How many lettuce plants should I get? Lettuce grow to be about 8 inches across, so you want to plant them about every 4 inches. If you want to do the lettuce blocks like us (2′ x 2′), get 4-8 plants per block, so 16-32. (Remember that we’ll also be seeding lettuce, which will help fill it in and costs less than plants. If you’re patient (unlike us), you could grow the lettuce entirely from seed, but you won’t be eating any for a good month.)
Lettuce is often sold in packs of four. If you’re doing your own thing, just figure out how much you like lettuce and how much of the garden you want to devote to it. Two or three 4 foot rows would give you a good amount to eat.
Again, look for ones with strong stems, and a nice green color. You might notice that some are darker green than others, which probably means it got more fertilizer. This is not necessarily a sign of a better tomato - as long as the tomato is a good solid green and not yellow or generally wimpy looking, you’re probably ok. Just make sure it is standing up straight, has a fairly thick stem, and is not floppy and delicate looking. Tomatoes are tough customers once it gets warm and usually recover from looking crappy once you get them in the ground, but you might as well start strong.
As with the lettuce, we recommend mixing it up. We’re growing a cherry tomato, an early fresh eating tomato, a sauce tomato that ripens a bit later, and another that is really yummy and ripens even later. This way, you get tomatoes that serve different needs (fresh eating, freezing/saucing) and that ripen at different points, so you always have something to eat.
Staggering the harvest is an important part of vegetable gardening, and it takes some planning and practice to get it right, but one easy way to ensure that you have a steady supply of tomatoes is to select ones that ripen in 50-60 days, others in 60-70 days, and, in longer season climates, 80 days and above. In a northern-ish, sometimes weather-iffy place like Seattle where we are, 80 days and over is usually too long for the tomato to reach its full potential. In other words, you could be staring at green tomatoes in September.
Some tomatoes will be sold in one gallon pots…
…some in 4 inch pots
…and some in little packs.
We are here to tell you that tomatoes grow really fast once they’re in the ground, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot which one you get. The one in the 4 inch pot will catch up to the size of the tomato in the 1-gallon pot in no time, so you can save money by getting the 4 inch one. The main thing to look for is a healthy plant. The ones in little packs might be root bound and under a bit of stress (though these ones above look nice and healthy), so we’d go for the slightly bigger size or get the little guy out of that pack quick.
As with the seeds, you’ll probably stand there and stare at many different versions of the same plant.
How do you know whether it is Greek Oregano (left), Puerto Rican Oregano (center), or Dwarf Greek Oregano that you want, when all you came here for was some regular old dang oregano?
Well, we’ll tell you. It’s the Greek Oregano. The classic thyme for cooking? English Thyme. That’s the traditional route - but Puerto Rican Oregano sounds intriguing. We might be back.
Also, a nursery with knowledgeable staff and quality signage can help take the mystery out of choosing plants. Any nursery worth its salt posts a sign with the plant’s name (Latin and common), how big it gets at maturity, and a helpful little description, like so:
Herbs grow pretty quickly, so you’ll probably just need one oregano and one thyme (each get to be about a foot across). We got two parsley (Italian) because we eat a lot of it, and you might want to get more than one chive if they’re a bit on the small side.
We got 4 little pots of violas, which are edible and can go into your salads. When buying flowers, don’t get suckered into buying the one that is in full bloom - you want some that are blooming, but you also want to look for lots of buds that will open later. Spread out the beauty, people.
This isn’t a lot of violas and we might end up getting more, but we were feeling a bit cheap. We will also be getting marigolds to plant by the tomatoes, so that will beef things up in the flower department. We’re waiting on those until we plant the tomatoes. If you get some, you will be confronted with many different kinds, most likely. Just pick the one you like.
A final word on Basil. It has been noticeably absent here, and there is a good reason for that: It’s still too cold for basil! You will see it at some nurseries, but do not be fooled. Basil is a very sensitive plant and needs to have warm days and nights. We don’t put ours in until well into May, sometimes the beginning of June.
At the end of our always delightful shopping trip to the nursery, we ended up with this box of goodies:
Thanks, West Seattle Nursery. Urban Land Army thinks you’re swell.
Local plant sales are also excellent places to pick up plants, and you’ll keep your money in the neighborhood. We’ll be planting tomatoes that we grew on our very own, and supplement them with interesting ones from the Seattle Tilth Edible Plant Sale - a must-go-to event for Seattle gardeners on May 2 and 3. You will truly not believe your eyes. They even have a plant list online so you can make your list beforehand. (They have beginner gardening and container gardening classes too!)
Now off to the plant store with you!
We’ll be here getting that compost into the new garden. See you back here tomorrow.