How Does My Garden Grow?

I recently received my 2010 Burpee Gardening catalog and had a load of fun perusing the more than 75 new varieties of plants it contained. Seventy five! I’m trying to decide what I want to plant this year in my garden…what worked well last year, what wasn’t so great, and some new stuff that looks promising!

My most favorite garden vegetable has got to be tomatoes. We usually have four plants that give us a nice crop throughout the growing season, with extras to give to neighbors and friends. I don’t can or freeze them, but I’ve thought recently that I may want to do that. This is mostly because I add tomatoes to so many of my recipes, and it’d be nice to know that they are organic and home grown yummy. So if I do want to freeze some, perhaps I want to add one or two plants. I’m sure there’ll be Early Girls and Better Boys, probably a Beefsteak, and I see that Burpee has a new variety called Tye-Dye Hybrid Tomato. It’s got better disease resistance, is bicolor and non-acidic. Yum!

Next on my list are the green beans that we love so much. A new, Burpee exclusive is the Beananza Bush Bean. Burpee says they’ll grow for twice as long as most beans, so I’ll add them to my list as well. Snap’em, rinse’em, steam’em and eat! I think we’ll need twenty plants at least…maybe thirty for freezing these too.

Beets, beets, beets. Gotta love’em. I think I like the greens as much as I like the roots. Chicago Red Hybrid is ready in 49 days, according to the catalog, with disease resistant leaves. My mother-in-law likes to pickle beets, and that will keep them on the shelf for months after harvest. I like them that way, too, but prefer them steamed until tender, then sliced and sautéed with a little chopped onion and butter…mmmmmm.

And to round out the garden, I’ll be planting two zucchini plants and two acorn squash plants. Burpee Hybrid zucchini matures in 50 days and is “still the standard variety for over 40 years”. High yielding on compact bush plants sounds like the ticket. Add to that the Acorn Table Queen takes 80 days to harvest, but is an Heirloom variety. I’m adding garden space on the north side of my house (the front) and plan on putting one of the squash plants there next to the driveway. I’ll get sun all day, and I can pick right when I get home. I like my zucchini sliced and grilled, with olive oil and some lemon pepper.

Planning a garden is such fun, but no where near as enjoyable as eating the 100% organic, picked and prepared on the same day garden veggies. I’m extra excited about the garden this year, too, because we have been composting all winter long and have lovely dark rich compost to till in to our garden soil and mulch on top to keep the soil airy and moist in our dry Colorado heat. All the nutrients from the BiOWiSH™ Compost Boost that we’ve been adding to the compost will bring an added boost to the soil. And this year, we’ll be ‘fertilizing’ with BiOWiSH™ for added size and top performance. Take a look at what it did for hydroponic lettuce (three weeks old!).