Efficient vegetable garden - what to plant now?

Hi,

well, it seems that I'll have plenty of time for a vegetable garden this year, and since we're pretty much heading into a full blown quarantine I would appreciate any thoughts about what to plant.

There's limited space, and only so much soil I can cultivate physicly, so what are efficient vegetables that can help cut food costs? I have unlimited supply of water, but also a legendary brown thumb. Only success last year were cucmbers and pumpkins that I planted on the old compost heap. And Topinambur, my all time favorite, that stuff is amazing.

Preitler

For me, salad and greens, are my "most important" garden priorities.
We plant rainbow, and lacinato kale,bib lettuce, onions, carrots, radishes, collards, and pac choi .
-- we also plant a few bell peppers, and always a bunch of tomatoes.

We have a lot of space here, so we also plant a lot of potatoes, and some yam,and taro .
I haven't grow corn since moving here, because it takes a lot of space, and fertilizer.
When I get more rabbits, I will "revisit" growing corn.
When feeding rabbits, the cornstalks and husks, are valuable enough for "growing corn to make sense". . We also, grow J. artichoke... love that also...
happy gardening,
Michael

Beans can offer a pretty good yield in a small space, especially if you like green beans and so use the pod too.

Of course tomatoes. If you’re not going for looks there are varieties that yield very well.

If you like squash, zucchini is prolific and easy to grow. There are other winter squash besides pumpkin you could try. We really like butternut.

I suppose some questions would be, what do you like to eat? What kind of storage do you have and do you do any canning?

Edit to add: I should have read for comprehension. As far as planting now, about the only things we would plant would be potatoes. Possibly onion sets, peas, or radish if the weather stays mild like it has been. But we don’t even have our garden cleaned up from last year yet. :roll:

Hm, beans, I could but up poles on the north side of the garden. Tomatoes, tried it 3 times in the last 5 years, they get brown and spoil right before being ripe.
I remember the epic struggles to keep slugs from eating anything green, salad would be a slug magnet. Maybe kale...

I have a cellar for storage, although it is beside the house and not under it and therefore too warm most of the time. I have another one, down by the creek with the well pump in it, I'm going to try that one this year, should be cooler. I don't can so far, but I have a freezer, although by winter it'll be pretty full with rabbits.

Onions and potatoes are so cheap, it isn't worth the bother. Well, if things don't turn apokalytic, or infaltion gets out of hand. Need to study time tables, when to plant what.

I'm not a picky eater, I think I want more than half of the produce to be easily storable. If things still look bad end of summer I might start canning.

If you are ruling out greens, the earliest things we plant are peas and potatoes. And having a small space, it helps to think about succession planting. For example, we plant peas that we shell out in spring, then plant snow peas in the same bed in fall. There are ways to deal with slugs, but maybe you've tried them already. Greens are just so good and take up so little space and they keep producing through a long season (kale, chard) or grow quickly so you can have several successions over the growing season.

I can't say much about what to plant now, as my growing season is still a long way off, but for limited space, I'd suggest doing as much vertical gardening as possible.

Cukes, many squashes, beans and peas, melons, even certain tomato varieties (maybe you'd have more luck with an indeterminate vining tomato variety if you haven't tried?) take up way less space if you can grow them upwards.

Also stuff with sparser or shorter vegetation like carrots, onions, radishes etc. can be sort of stuck in among any larger plants you might want. I think root vegetables tend to use different nutrients than greens and fruits also, so competition is not huge even when you might get a little crowded with those things.

Potatoes are super cheap to buy, but if you felt like trying them anyway,
even with limited garden space, if you have space for a container or two, I've heard good things about harvesting loads from buckets and totes. Haven't tried that yet

I have a raised bed garden which is pretty small and I have a tendency to over plant it. I try to get things to go vertical and fertilize it heavily with bunny 'berries' so the plants have enough nutrients even though they're planted too close.

Bean vines are nicely vertical and should be grown where they won't shade the rest of the garden. Unless you plant something that needs shade.

There's some beets and we eat the beet greens by just taking some of the outer leaves as the roots are growing and then we eat the roots.

Leaf lettuce doesn't take up as much space as head lettuce and you can harvest the outer leaves and let it keep growing until it goes to seed. once it starts going to seed, then I'll pull up the plant and feed that to the bunnies and plant more. Our area gets hot in the summer, so we grow the romaine, red lettuces and 'Buttercrunch' types in the summer.

Cherry tomatoes do well in our area and they are also vines and can be grown vertically.

Mostly, though, grow what you like to eat. Grow what gives you joy! We have a lot of culinary herbs as part of the garden as well as tea plants. Mint is nice and easy to grow, I let it out into the lawn where it smells nice when we mow and we can pick the leaves (before mowing) and make tea.