I would like to get my front garden contributing towards the food bill. I?m at a loss as to what to grow. Not only must the garden be aesthetically pleasing (whingeing neighbours) but the house faces north and the garden spends a lot of time in the shade. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. Vegetables
Everything depends on climate. Where I live you can grow artichokes and asparagus in part shade.
Plant a ground cover and have the artichokes as accent plants growing out of it. However, in my garden, the artichokes grow in the shade of a high-branching ash tree. They go dormant in the summer, sprouting up again in late fall to produce delicious buds in the spring.
Plant asparagus against your house. When the spears start coming up too thin, stop harvesting and let the plants grow for the rest of the year. They will make a nice foundation plant. They turn golden yellow in the fall and then go dormant in the winter. Mine grow in the shade of a peach tree.
I also have dwarf citrus, guavas, and loquats in partial shade. These are both ornamental and fruitful. My neighbor across the street has a fig tree with delicious fruit; it's growing on the east side of his house and gets only about 3-4 hours of sun a day.
Total shade, however might be a problem.
You don't have too many vegetable choices on the north side. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, corn, peppers, potatoes grow best in full fun. You may be able to grow strawberries in part shade.
I had always thought that Texas had high summer temperatures much like I do here in Oz. I have to put up shade cloth in high summer here to stop sunburn on quite a lot of my veg plants.
As are strawberries.
I've had very different experiemces with Swish Chard. I believe it is one of the best value plants around because it's virtually bomb proof and it's one plant that I always advise people to plant. If you have Swiss Chard, eggs and a few basics in the pantry you can laways make a meal.
PeterGreenMan wrote:
Well beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, especially with whiny or prima donna neighbors.
If you eat, as I do, you garnish your sandwiches with lettuce and have salad, and/or vegetables with dinner. These may not be big ticket items but over 365 days they do add up. Lettuce comes in different shapes and colors and if you "google" Chateau Villandry, you will see that their extensive vegetable garden (a tourist attraction) is laid out in a very pleasing way. It's an impractical scale for a home owner but it should give you some ideas as to what can be done. Growing flowers, such as sweet alyssum, amongst the lettuce attracts lacewings and syrphid flies that eat the aphids that can molest lettuces. (see citation below, p.
165)Growing lettuce and Swiss chard can be decorative as well as aiding your budget by providing "fresh" produce to your table when you want it.
I would advise growing it organically. Harsh chemicals can scorch young leaves, and nitrogen fertilizers render lettuces more vulnerable to insects. It seems the bugs are attracted to the' free nitrogen in their leaves, and because of the more rapid growth of chemically nourished plants, insects find their leaves easier to pierce.
If the taste and texture of fresh lettuce and Swiss chard wasn't enough, you may save medical expenses as well. In the citation below, be sure to read paragraphs four and on.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
I had made pretty much the same meal on several occasions at home, using the same basic foodstuffs, yet in certain invisible ways this wasn't the same food at all. Apart from the high color of the egg yolks, these eggs looked pretty much like any other eggs, the chicken like chicken, but the fact that the animals in question had spent their lives outdoors on pastures rather than in a shed eating grain distinguished their flesh and eggs in important, measurable ways. A growing body of scientific research indicates that pasture substantially changes the nutritional profile of chicken and eggs, as well as of beef and milk. The question we asked about organic food--is it any better than the conventional kind?--turns out to be much easier to answer in the case of grass-farmed food.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the large quantities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh of the animals that eat that grass. (It's the carotenoids that give these egg yolks their carroty color.) That flesh will also have considerably less fat in it than the flesh of animals fed exclusively on grain--also no surprise, in light of what we know about diets high in carbohydrates. (And about exercise, something pastured animals actually get.) But all fats are not created equal--polyunsaturated fats are better for us than saturated ones, and certain unsaturated fats are better than others. As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat.
This is no accident. Taking the long view of human nutrition, we evolved to eat the sort of foods available to hunter-gatherers, most of whose genes we've inherited and whose bodies we still (more or less) inhabit. Humans have had less than ten thousand years--an evolutionary blink--to accustom our bodies to agricultural food, and as far as our bodies are concerned, industrial agricultural food--a diet based largely on a small handful of staple grains, like corn--is still a biological novelty. Animals raised outdoors on grass have a diet much more like that of the wild animals humans have been eating at least since the Paleolithic era than that of the grain-fed animals we only recently began to eat.
So it makes evolutionary sense that pastured meals, the nutritional profile of which closely resembles that of wild game, would be better for us. Grass-fed meat, milk, and eggs contain less total fat and less saturated fats than the same foods from grain-fed animals. Pastured animals also contain conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatly acid dial. some recent studies indicate may help reduce weight and prevent cancer, and which is absent from feedlot animals. But perhaps most important, meat, eggs, and milk from pastured animals also contain higher levels of omega-3s, essential fatty acids created in the cells of green plants and algae that play an indispensable role in human health, and especially in the growth and health of neurons--brain cells. (It's important to note that fish contain higher levels of the most valuable omega-3s than land animals, yet grass-fed animals do offer significant amounts of such important omega-3s as alpha linolenic acid--ALA.) Much research into the role of omega-3s in the human diet remains to be done, but the preliminary findings are suggestive: Researchers report that pregnant women who receive supplements of omega-3s give birth to babies with higher IQs; children with diets low in omega-3s exhibit more behavioral and learning problems at school; and puppies eating diets high in omega-3s prove easier to train. (All these claims come from papers presented at a 2004 meeting of the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids.)
One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seeds of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. As the name indicates, both kinds of fat are essential, but problems arise when they fall out of balance. (In fact, there's research to suggest that the ratio of these fats in our diet may be more important than the amounts.) Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. (Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-innammatory.) As our diet--and the diet of the animals we eat--shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. (The process of hydrogenadng oil also eliminates omega-3s.) We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrought by the industrialization of our food chain. It was a change we never noticed, since the importance of omega-3s was not recognized until the 1970s. As in the case of our imperfect knowledge of soil, the limits of our knowledge of nutrition have obscured what the industrialization of the food chain is doing to our health. But changes in the composition of fats in our diet may account for many of the diseases of civilization--cardiac, diabetes, obesity, etc.--that have long been linked to modern eating habits, as well as for learning and behavioral problems in children and depression in adults.
Research in this area promises to turn a lot of conventional nutritional thinking on its head. It suggests, for example, that the problem with eating red meat--long associated with cardiovascular disease-- may owe less to the animal in question than to that animal's diet. (This might explain why there are hunter-gatherer populations today who eat far more red meat than we do without suffering the cardiovascular consequences.) These days farmed salmon are being fed like feedlot cattle, on grain, with the predictable result that their omega- 3 levels fall well below those of wild fish. (Wild fish have especially high levels of omega-3 because the fat concentrates as it moves up the food chain from the algae and phytoplankton that create it.) Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on grain, we might actually be better off eating the beef. (Grass-finished beef has a two-to-one ratio of omega-6 to -3 compared to more than ten to one in corn-fed beef.) The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you're eating has itself eaten.
The fact that the nutritional quality of a given food (and of that food's food) can vary not just in degree but in kind throws a big wrench into an industrial food chain, the very premise of which is that beef is beef and salmon salmon. It also throws a new light on the whole question of cost, for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta carotene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel's $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs actually represent a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket. As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go on unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
A ta sante et bon appetit
I vegetable garden to grow varieties that are not readily available at typical greengrocers, to have absolutely fresh picked, and for fun. Even with staggering my plantings where possible most of each crop ripens pretty much all at once so I can't possibly consume it all before it rots... there is only so much lettuce, tomatos, and cukes one can consume each day. And even if so inclined salad veggies do not lend themselves to canning/preserving, and if one chooses to can then that cost needs to be accounted for; time, labor, energy, and materials... I freeze where I can but maintaining an extra freezer costs too... I find it far more advantageous to use my crops in recipes (stews, soups, sauces) and then freeze that rather than the individual veggies. When I figure in all my costs and what I give away rather than it rot not only don't I save money, it costs me money to garden.... so long as you keep in mind it's a hobby you'll be fine. It's not possible to grow veggies in the home garden at a profit unless you sell your excess, and even then you're not likely to recoup *all* your expenses. Were I to do an accounting of all my veggie gardening supplies it would be enough to keep me in store bought veggies for the next 20 years.
Zones or size are not meaningful to me as they aren't used here (which I think also applies anywhere outside the US - I think that system is US specific) . My State is 200,000 square kms bigger than Texas and this is the 5th largest State in the country so it'd be interesting to see how anyone would try to use a zone system here. We tend to use a more general descriptor like 'temperate', Mediterranean, cold (althought cold here means our form of cold, not Northern Hemisphere snow and ice type cold - heavy frosts type cold.
I guess we too would have what you describe as two short seasons with blazing heat in the middle, however that wouldn't be an issue with some crops such as tomatoes or corn.
I need greens all year round somust continue to grow them through the blazing plant crisping days of high summer.
I think that would be rather a nuisance. Have you tried the shading trick to keep up production? Shaded ground is cooler ground both day and night and it works well if somewhat painfull to keep up.
But the OP didn't specify 'no sun'. Strawberries will grow and produce in limited sun if there is warmth.
Perhaps I was too general and should have included recipes on the dozens of ways I can use Swiss Chard. I also should have been more specific about the conditions under which I grow it.
Try groiwng it in shade in your mid summer. Try using the tiny new leaves raw in a salad. Try using the big thick old ribs on their own cooked and served in a white sauce whilst using the leaves in soup. Onlyu 3 ideas for this most versatile of vegetables.
Why not? It really is a wonderful vegetable. I couldn't stand it as a child as it was always overcooked (always cooked! - it's wonderful raw) and had that ghastly unrelieved iron taste to it. For that I have to thank my mother's cooking. It was only as an adult that I came to appreciate it - the same applies for cabbage. Home grown cabbage, cooked straight from the garden was similarly a revelation to me as an adult.
but being a vegetarian I will certainly try
It's one of those veg that, although I have lots of recipes in which I use it, I use it more frequently in a quite ad hoc way. If something I'm making needs a bit of raw green, then I'll chop up tiny new leaves - I use if often in rice salads for instances. I add it to fritattas (not useful for a vegan I know but I keep chooks and have to use lots of eggs) but that is just another example. I've even used it with goats cheese and Balsamic vinegar to top a pizza so it was wilted rather than cooked. Too many uses really to be too specific.
I'm going
Sounds good. How do you make that?
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