My challenge to you.
Grow something. Learn to grow anything, even one bite of food. Start learning. For your family’s food security, it’s important to learn to grow your own food. Economies ebb and flow, jobs ebb and flow, energy ebbs and flows, the climate... you get the picture. It’s certainly better for your health (also click here and here), it’s tastier, it’s rewarding physically and mentally, it’s cheaper than buying food, and you’re cutting out the fossil fuels used and CO2 emitted in transporting and storing that food.
It doesn’t matter if you have a large garden, a concrete patio, or just a windowsill inside. You can garden. If you have just a patio, you can do amazing things with containers. Click here for more information, and check out books specific to container gardening, like this one. If you have just an indoor window, you can grow lettuce, herbs, sprouts (and more about sprouts), tomatoes, and several other things (for that latter reference, scroll half-way down the page).
Don’t be frightened.
If the things don’t grow, you’ve learned something and you can ask your local Master Gardeners what you did wrong for free - it’s their job! And then you’ll try a different approach next year. And you will be one step ahead if you need to grow your own food later.
A year ago today, I was tending to my poor sad smog-ridden pots of herbs back in L.A. Matt and I (mostly Matt) tried to grow a few vegetables on our patio, and that was my entire vegetable-growing experience before last Spring. What a loooooong way we’ve come!
What I did not grow from seed last year.
You’ve seen our tomato harvest. The tomatoes, cayenne peppers and summer squash were the only plants we did not grow from seed. Honestly, at that time I didn’t know I could grow from seed. But I read and I read and I read, and I figured it out by reading and by doing.
What I grew from seed last year.
Broccoli, 5 types of bush beans, 3 types of pole beans, green peppers, 2 types of beets, 6 types of radishes, 5 types of carrots, 2 types of kale, 2 types of shallots, kohlrabi, bulb fennel, beetberry, brussels sprouts, chicory, endive, radicchio, ground cherries, tomatillos, parsley, sage, rosemary, cilantro, more types of salad greens than I can count, and lots of insect-attracting flowers.
Introductory books I recommend.
One important note I have is that you don’t have to know everything before you start gardening. All you need to know first is how to start seeds. So first read about that, and while the seeds are germinating, you can move onto learning about soil and what tools to buy. Take it inch by inch, bite by bite.
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1.American Horticultural Society: Encyclopedia of Gardening. This is a great introduction to pretty much every aspect of gardening. The key for me was that it had little bite-sized pieces I could take in slowly - it wasn’t as overwhelming as other books. It is not an organic gardening book, however. I used it to get a sense of what I was getting into, and then I moved to other books.
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2.California Master Gardener Handbook. I know, it’s for California. If you’re not in California, try your local master gardeners to see what they have. This one is 700 pages of overwhelmingly useful information. I still haven’t read it all, but it has planting dates broken out by region, it has a great soil chapter, and it spends a lot of time on each major crop. Indispensable!
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3.Either How to Grow More Vegetables, The New Organic Grower, or Four Season Harvest. Any of these three books will get you to the next level of understanding organic gardening.
Where I buy my seed.
Now that I know the difference, I firmly believe that heirloom, open-pollinated, organic seeds are the best choice. That is a lengthy discussion in itself, which I will save for another time. However, each of the below resources offers some or all of those options.
While I feel guilty when I see all the paper I am wasting by ordering these catalogs, I just love browsing through them before bed, or at the breakfast table. There’s something different about that rather than the computer screen. All of these places have both catalog and website, so you take your pick.
Where I have ordered from:
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1.Seed Savers Exchange. If you haven’t visited this site, you’ll be amazed at the variety offered. This is a non-profit organization “dedicated to the preservation of heirloom seeds.” I have had great success with their seeds. (Plus, when eventually you start saving your own seed, SSE has a great forum for trading seed with others, for even more variety.)
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John Wise, one of our readers, also pointed out to me that they are the publishers of Seed to Seed - a definitive seed-saving book I’ve been meaning to buy for some time now.
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2.Seeds of Change. All organic, very reliable seed. I love it.
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3.Peaceful Valley Garden Supply. All organic, also very reliable. I find their print catalog to be much easier to read. They also have a number of great supplies, and the catalog has some great charts about what cover crops to plant when... but I’m getting ahead of myself!
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4.Bountiful Gardens. Heirloom, untreated, open-pollinated seed from the publishers of How to Grow More Vegetables.
Additional places I may try this year (please let me know if you’ve tried these, and if so, what you think!):
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5.Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Their catalog is incredible. I’ve never seen so many winter squash - seven pages of them! And amazing pictures, too. And... 13 - thirteen! - pages of heirloom tomatoes. Wow. I have choices to make.
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6.The Natural Gardening Company. A local nursery that boasts that it is the oldest certified organic nursery in the U.S. Matt and I are goo-goo-eyed by the heirloom melons they have.
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7.Territorial Seed Company. A large variety of seeds, some heirloom.
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8.The Pepper Gal. Just peppers. Lots and lots of peppers.
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9.One Green World. I am obsessed with finding fruits that aren’t from a tree (we don’t have a lot of room for trees). This catalog has some amazing varieties of fruits of all kinds, many of which I’ve never heard of.
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10.Forest Farm. A 500 page catalog of shrubs, trees, and vines. No kidding - 500 pages.
When to start your seeds.
It varies for each plant, and it varies for your agricultural zone. Seed catalogs will tell you approximately when to plant each crop, based on ideal germination temperature ranges and your last frost date (if you don’t know the latter, consult your Master Gardeners). Often this information is also written on the back of the seed packet.
Don’t worry too terribly much about starting your seeds at exactly the right time - last year we planted things months too late, but it still worked out well. Just don’t directly seed or transplant when there is danger of frost, unless you know it’s ok for the plant/seed - or you provide some crop protection. More on that later.
Go now, order your catalogs, order your seeds, order a book or 2 if you can, and I’ll try and help you get through the next step!
