Choose Your Vegetables

I'm assuming you read the last blog entry: Choose Your Plot. So hopefully you've already decided (more or less) on what garden area or containers you are going to grow in. Now it's time to decide what to plant and how to fit it in to your garden.

Here is the shortlist of easy-to-grow and tasty vegetables: 

Early spring planting:

• Mizuna
• Arugula
• Mustard Greens
• Chicory
• Chard
• Peas
• Chives

Late spring planting:

• Climbing Beans
• Bush Beans
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Basil
• Nasturtiums

Some may be unfamiliar. (A few of them are rarely, if ever, sold commercially.) You can read more about them on the short list page, or look them up elsewhere if you're unsure.

The next task is to choose which ones to grow and plan how they are going to fit in your space. We don't have to figure out the exact details in advance, but we do have to figure out the general layout. A rough plan on paper helps because:

• Some plants need to be planted early (they grow well in cool weather), and some plants need to be planted later (they can't tolerate cold weather).
• Some plants grow tall and will shade out smaller plants unless they are positioned behind them relative to the sun.
• Some plants take up a lot of room, and will leave no room for anything else if you plant too much of them!

So all that takes a little bit of working out. Maybe you'll need as much as an hour to piece this all together the first time.

Once we have a rough plan, we can be pretty relaxed. The plan ensures we know what will fit where, in your containers or your area of earth, so that we don't buy seeds or seedlings we might not have room for.

1. To start with, list the vegetables from the short list that you really want to grow. Or if you're growing something else that's not on the list, put that down. Substitutions are fine with me, as long as you don't mind doing some figuring out for them on your own! You can let me know in the comments what you're growing, and I'll help out if I can.

Most of all remember that one of our guiding principles is: only grow what you really want to grow. See the How We Keep It Simple page for the zucchini story if you need to be reminded why.

2. Now sketch your containers or garden patch on a piece of paper or in a notebook, with some rough indication of the size of the containers or plot. For containers, try to make the positions of the containers relative to each other fairly accurate on the diagram. That's because we have to plan for light and shade with taller plants and shorter plants.

Is it clear to you which direction the main daytime sun will be coming from? Where most of your sun will be coming from depends on where you are planting: for example if you're on a west-facing balcony, most of the sun will probably be coming from the south-west diagonal. In a wide open area, the strongest sun will be coming from the south.

Once you've figured this out, indicate the main direction of day time sun on the diagram. If you're having trouble with this, it will probably help to go out to the location and look at the situation from right there. This doesn't have to be extremely precise, but should be mostly right so you can position your tall and short plants in such a way that the tall ones won't shade out the short ones.

Next we will lay out the plants in the sketch.

3. Position the climbers first.

Sketch out the areas of your plot or containers that will contain the climbers. The climbing plants from the short list are peas, cherry tomatoes, and climbing beans.

If you are growing climbing plants (which need some kind of tall support), they have to be in a place where they won't shade out the other ones. That is, they need to be behind the other plants, from the point of view of the daytime sun, which hopefully you already drew on your diagram.

Peas and beans are planted quite close together (a few inches apart) in a row or group where they will climb the support you provide: a fence, or very tall strong stakes and strings.

Cherry tomatoes are planted individually, further apart - at least 6 inches apart, or one per pot. They will also need strong, tall support.

Using those distances, figure out approximately how many plants you will have of each type.

4. Now fill in the self-supporting plants. These rest of the plants in our list support themselves, so they are just planted to fill an area at their preferred spacing, like dots in a grid. But some of them can be planted closer together than others.

So what you do now is sketch out the areas of your plot or containers that will contain each of these plants.

There's lots of factors you can consider when you decide to lay these ones out. It's a bit harder to plant the late spring plants behind early spring plants, for one thing (because the early spring ones will be in place and growing already). For another placement example, I pick spring greens often (like whenever I make a sandwich), so for me it's nice if they're near the edge, very easy to reach.

Here is a table to help summarize the planting needs of each plant. Still, don't worry about it too much. Plants are not perfectionists.

	Height	Planting Time	Spacing
Peas	climber	early spring	close row or group (3cm)
Climbing Beans	climber	late spring	close row or group (5cm)
Cherry Tomatoes	climber	late spring	wide (15cm)
Mustard Greens	tall (1m)	early spring	close (5cm)
Basil	tall (1m)	late spring	med (10cm)
Mizuna	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Arugula	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Chicory	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Chard	low	early spring	med (8cm)
Chives	low	early spring	close group (1cm)
Bush Beans	low	late spring	med (10cm)
Nasturtium	low	late spring	close group (3cm)

Basil and mustard greens are both quite tall, so you should consider the shade issue again - they should be behind any lower plants (from the point of view of the sun), so they don't shade shorter plants. Basil is traditionally grown beside the tomatoes to ward off tomato pests. Basil and mustard greens should both be planted to fill their areas at spacings of about 4 to 6 inches apart.

Some of the greens - arugula, mizuna, and chicory - are grown very close together in their area, about 2 - 3 inches apart.

Bush beans and chard need a bit more space: they should fill their area at 4 to 6 inches apart.

Nasturtiums and chives will both eventually form bigger clumps, so you just need to find one spot or a few spots for each of these, with some space around for them to spread into.

As you sketch in where each of your vegetables will go, also note down approximately how many of each plant will fit into that space you've allotted.

5. Don't worry. Sure, it can get complicated and confusing, but it doesn't matter that much. Believe me, stuff will grow and it will taste good. So let's just keep this fun and interesting and low stress! That's why we call this "side plot", and not "melodrama" or "tragicomedy".

6. Keep your list somewhere safe. No, no, it's not secret, you don't have to hide it. Just don't lose it, that's all I'm saying.