• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Home Garden Joy
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Gardening Basics
    • Seed Starting
    • Composting Basics
    • Vegetable Gardening
    • Growing Fruit
    • Growing Herbs
  • Recipes
    • Canning and Food Preservation
    • Vegetarian Meals
    • Salad Recipes
    • Soup Recipes
    • Dinner Recipes
    • Dessert Recipes
  • Books & Classes
    • Classes
    • Books
    • Books for Christian Herbalists
  • About
    • Writer Jeanne Grunert
    • Advertise
    • Awards and Accolades
    • Privacy Policy

Garden Planning for Next Year – New Vegetables

November 24, 2018 by Jeanne

This is the time of year when I do my garden planning for next year. At first, it’s the seed catalogs flooding my mailbox that inspire me. But then it’s thoughts of what could be…dreams of a productive, overflowing vegetable garden that fills my heart with gladness.

Garden Planning for Next Year

After only a few weeks post-gardening season, I’m itching to get back into my raised bed vegetable garden and play in the dirt. I’m reading “Deep Rooted Wisdom” by Augustus Farmer, and it’s a wonderfully inspirational book packed with gardening ideas.

Farmer embraces the permaculture ideal. I’ve tried taking courses in permaculture, and frankly, I found it intimidating and confusing. What does it really mean? It’s like organic gardening on steroids. It always sounds like you just plant a jumble of stuff and hope for the best, but I know that can’t be right.

This book untangles a lot of my confusion around permaculture and makes it easier to grasp. It’s about building up the soil – check, that’s an organic gardening concept I understand. I love learning about the fungi, the insects, the mycorrhiza web hidden in the soil transforming materials into living vegetables, flowers, plants.

Some of the concepts aren’t going to go over well in this household. Leaving clover in the garden beds won’t make my husband happy. He’s on the warpath against weeds of all sorts and loves a manicured garden. However, he also loves hardwood mulch, and I just finished reading a chapter in the book about how wood chips encourage earthworm colonies and healthy soil.

I’m all for the woodchip mulch now.

vegetable garden

Thinking About New Vegetables

In addition to reading all about permaculture, I’m also thinking about my vegetable garden. This year, I grew all sorts of heirloom tomatoes. I think I grew the greatest variety of tomatoes I’ve ever had in the garden. I liked the Chocolate Taz, didn’t much like the Hungarian Paste tomatoes which tended to rot before they reached ripeness.

But what about other vegetables? I’m looking into growing orach. Orach, also called Mountain Spinach, is a spinach-like vegetable native to my region, the Appalachians. It grows quite tall, doesn’t mind the heat, and produces edible leaves that cook up like spinach. I’m intrigued.

Why Don’t We See Such Variety in the Supermarket?

As I browse through my seed catalogs, I have a sudden longing for Swiss chard. I love chard. I go grocery shopping on Friday morning and can’t find chard anywhere. There’s one type of kale, two types of lettuce (the Romaine was just recalled, which would make three). There is no fresh spinach except a wilted bunch leftover on the greens shelf and bags of washed spinach. One white cauliflower head, one type of broccoli.

It’s so sad!

My seed catalog overflows with variety. Orange, purple, and white cauliflower, seven types of broccoli including really neat-looking Romanescu with sculptural florets resembling some sort of brain coral. Lettuce? Four pages of lettuce seeds! I love garnet lettuce which is a deep, glowing ruby red, but there’s speckled lettuce, Deer Tongue lettuce for the southern United States, frilly leafed lettuce, oh you name it, it’s beautiful and it’s there.

Why isn’t it on my grocery store shelves?

When I shop with my husband, he frowns a lot at the “unusual” vegetables. “This should be purple,” he’ll say, pointing to an eggplant. Red lettuce? His frown deepens. It’s just not right.

But it IS right, and it has always BEEN right, that nature produces variety. It’s our supermarkets with their emphasis on consistent product quality and identical apples and perfect spherical tomatoes that ship well and won’t bruise that have created a virtual food desert and turned so many people off to real food – the kind of food that human beings thrived on for eons before the advent of boxed meals and drive-through windows.

swiss-chard

Rainbow Swiss chard. Delicious, beautiful, and you can’t find it in the stores.

Orach It Is, and More Variety in My Garden

So orach it is, and garnet lettuce, broccoli rabe, rainbow chard, leeks, small purple turnips, golden beets, and Chocolate Tazmanian tomatoes. My husband has a request in for me to try to grow and can pearl onions so that we have the “right” kind for Thanksgiving next year. We both love creamed onions but cannot find the kind in glass jars at the supermarket, the kind our grandmothers used to make holiday creamed onions. I’ve tried making her recipe with frozen pearl onions; dreadful, hard little marbles that never cooked into the sweet, tender, creamy dish we both recall.

My plea to all the gardeners out there reading this is to explore, experiment, and embrace variety. Hey, we can all buy iceberg lettuce at the grocery store. But garnet lettuce?

If you aren’t sure whether your family will like it or not so you’re afraid to grow something ‘weird’, browse the farmer’s market first and buy a few ‘weird’ vegetables to try. Maybe the purple cauliflower will be a hit with your four-year-old and get him to eat cauliflower; or the parsnip and potatoe pancakes will be your new favorite meatless meal.

I’m planning my 2019 garden now. Will you join me in planning something special, something different, something unique?

 

 

Jeanne
Jeanne

Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.

Tweet
Share
Pin
Share2
2 Shares

Filed Under: Vegetable Gardening Tagged With: garden planning

Follow me on social media

Like
Follow
Follow
Follow
Follow
Previous Post: « Where Do Bugs Go in the Winter?
Next Post: Easy Leftover Turkey Casserole Recipe »

Primary Sidebar

Let’s Connect!

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • YouTube

Featured

logo of the american horticulture society

Home Garden Joy was featured by the American Horticultural Society on #plantchat.

We were featured in Porch.com and answered reader's questions about indoor plants.

Writer Jeanne Grunert

cover of plan and build a raised bed garden

Find all my books on Amazon.com

Gardening Articles

Vegetable Gardening Tips and Tricks

17 year cicada

Do the 17 Year Cicadas Hurt Gardens?

strawberries are great for vertical gardening

Vertical Gardening to Expand Your Space

rosemary growing in containers for space saving gardens

5 EASY Space Saving Vegetable Garden Ideas

Footer

a plate of Sicilian pasta sauce with cauliflower

Vegan Cauliflower Recipe: Sicilian Sauce

I adapted this vegan cauliflower recipe for Sicilian sauce to my family’s low salt, plant based diet – and got great results. It’s easy to make, tastes wonderful, and gives us another meatless meal for Lent. If you are a Christian seeking Friday dinner ideas for Lent, or simply have a head of cauliflower you…

Read More

A stack or portobello mushrooms with garnish

Marinaded and Grilled Portobello Mushroom Steaks

I made these marinaded and grilled portobello mushroom steaks last night for dinner and they came out delicious! Alongside a pot of fresh vegetable soup and crusty, homemade Italian bread, it was a feast worthy of a king – but 100% vegetarian. Let’s get cooking! What Is a Portobello Mushroom? Portobello mushrooms are large brown…

Read More

a woman holding a popover with the cream interior revealed and two other popovers on a plate

Best Popover Recipe

This is the best popover recipe ever! It was easy to make and turned out delicious popovers. This was my first time making popovers, and I can’t remember the last time I had one, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. As usual, I turned to my trusty Fannie Farmer 13th Edition Cookbook and found…

Read More

Christmas present under the tree

Christmas Gifts for Gardeners: Your Holiday Gift Guide

Are you looking for Christmas gifts for gardeners? This is your holiday gift guide to find the perfect present for that special gardener in your life! Ready? Let’s go shopping! Christmas Gifts for Gardeners: Your Holiday Gift Guide Maybe you’re searching for the perfect Christmas gifts for gardeners in your life. Or perhaps you are…

Read More

Copyright © 2023 Home Garden Joy on the Foodie Pro Theme