- Mizuna, Arugula, and Mustard (early greens)
- Peas (especially the edible pod types)
- Chicory
- Chard
- Beans
- Cherry Tomatoes
- Basil
- Chives
- Nasturtiums
Mizuna, Arugula, Mustard: The Early Spring Greens
These leaf vegetables are all in the same family (though they look and taste different) and are all very easy to grow. They are about the earliest thing you can plant outside - as soon as the snow is gone and the soil has thawed and drained enough to dig. Personally, I always grow all three. They go to flower by early summer, and are basically finished for you by then. However, you can plant them again in the summer and be harvesting greens all fall until the first really deep freeze of early winter (usually mid-November in Toronto, though once in a while almost until Christmas).
I use them all in the same ways: both in salads, especially added to lettuce to give it more flavour and variety, and in sandwiches.
Mizuna: mildest and earliest. It has narrow frilly leaves with the slightest hint of mustard oil and a very slight sourness. Mizuna grows fastest, but also lasts the shortest time - you get down to the very tiny leaves on the flower stalks just a few weeks after you start eating it.
Arugula: familiar to many people these days. It has dark wavy-edged narrow leaves, has a distinctive strong, dark, spicy flavour. Arugula is a little slower to start than Mizuna, but the harvest lasts longer too.
Mustard greens: the spiciest of the three, with a quick, hot wasabi-like burn. The leaves are larger, and there are varieties that grow very large. It is the slowest to reach harvest, but keeps growing well into early summer, and the large leaves mean it has more food to offer.
Peas (edible pod types)
Edible-pod peas are delicious and easy to grow, as long as you provide climbing support. Peas are a fast-growing vine that gives its pods in early summer. Peas are planted early too, since they grow best in cool weather and stop producing pods as soon a summer starts to get hot. Even if you plant just a small patch, peas are very satisfying. They're delicious just to pick off the vine and eat while you're gardening. And a small amount makes a great addition to any salad, or in other dishes like stir fries or cooked grains.
Chicory
Chicory is also planted early like the other spring greens. But it doesn't grow nearly as fast as the others, and doesn't stop growing in the summer, so it can be picked all summer and fall.
Chicory is strongly bitter. People say it's less bitter early in the season, but it seems pretty bitter to me, even then. So chicory is only a good choice if you like bitter greens. I like it best in sandwiches or mixed in with other salad greens, where its bitterness is tasty but not as overwhelming.
The chicory that's grown in the garden is quite similar to wild chicory that grows as a weed all over the city, and it is also the same plant whose roots are forced in darkness to grow the small white or purple heads usually called "Belgian Endive" in grocery stores.
Chard
Like Chicory, Chard is another leaf vegetable that you can harvest continuously all summer and fall. Unlike chicory, it is not really bitter, though the red varieties have a strong flavour of their own. I prefer the green and "rainbow" varieties because they have a mellower flavour.
Lately all the coolest gardeners are putting chard in their ornamental landscaping. It may only be a trend, but if they give you an inch, take a mile: that gives us licence to plant any vegetable I want in the landscaping.
Green Beans (and yellow and purple ones too)
Bush beans are low growing clumps that generally give all their pods in a fairly short period. For this reason, they are the beans you find available to buy in grocery stores here. In a larger space, you can grow a few square meters of bush beans and easily have enough mature at once to make many jars of pickled beans.
Climbing beans, on the other hand, are tall climbing vines that have a more spread out harvest. They produce for much of the summer. They also have a wider range of flavours, some with flat pods are particularly nice, with a nuttier flavour than bush beans. When you grow climbing beans, you understand Jack and the Beanstock. In the first hot weather, it seems like they grow a foot a day. It's not hard to imagine them going just a little further.
You can also grow eda mame, soy beans for eating fresh. They grow quite tall (but not as tall as climbing beans), so they can be helped with some support when they get bigger (or they fall over). They don't climb, so you'll have to tie them to a stake or something. My home grown ones are significantly tastier than the eda mame you buy, so if you like eda mame these could be a good choice.
Cherry Tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes of the "indeterminate" type - which means they grow as vigorous vines - qualify as a very easy plant to grow. Other tomatoes are less easy. So in this column, I'm just going to include the wonderfully aggressive, fast-growing, ever-producing cherry tomatoes, of which there are many varieties. Larger tomato varieties always disappoint me, and I don't even know why they don't produce very much - I'm just not a careful enough gardener, or something. Or I have unreasonable expectations. If you want to grow larger tomatoes, I suggest you do some extra reading! Maybe you can tell me the secret - but if the secret is hard work, I guess that won't help me.
Basil
Basil can be a bit hard to get started compared to some of the others, but once it's got a good start, a single plant will provide you with lots of fresh leaves for great salads and garnishes all summer and fall, and a half-dozen plants will make you a few jars of pesto for the freezer. It's also a classic "companion plant" to grow near tomatoes: the basil repels some insects that eat tomato plants. Basil grows quite tall (3 feet or more), but it is self-supporting.
Chives
Chives are a perennial, not a typical annual vegetable. You plant them once, and each year they will keep coming back each year in the same spot, from permanent clusters of small bulbs that slowly spread. (Therefore you plant these somewhere they can stay permanently - but it's also easy to dig them up anytime to move them or split them into more clumps, too.)
Starting the second year, chives start growing extremely early each spring, so they will become one of the very first things you can eat from the garden. And their mild garlic-onion flavour makes them great chopped in salads, grain dishes, potatoes, etc. The purple flowers are pretty, too.
Furthermore, the garlic/onion family repels pests you don't want, and those flowers feed pollinating bees that you do want. So starting some clumps chives in or beside your vegetable garden, or in other places like flower gardens is a great way to permanently improve your garden.
Nasturtiums
These are probably more familiar to people as ornamentals, but both the leaves and flowers are delicious in salads. The leaves are spicy, with a wasabi-like burn that comes and goes quickly. The flowers are both sweet with nectar and very mildly spicy. They are incredibly beautiful in a salad or as a garnish on other things.
You can't usually buy Nasturtium leaves or flowers in grocery stores, or even at farmers' markets, because they are too delicate to transport. So they are a delicacy that can only be obtained by growing it yourself.
They are not only vigorous growers, and beautiful, but also beneficial in the garden, since they repel some insects, and attract aphids away from less vigorous plants. (However, that does mean that you need to keep an eye out for aphids on them. Pull off and put aphidy leaves in the compost or just anywhere far from your other vegetables.)
