Dec
27
2009
What are the best choices for a home garden?
Posted by greenthumb in Gardening Questions
What is best to plant in a home garden? Keep in mind it is not huge and we would like to plant things that will take up the least amount of space but yield a nice harvest. So I guess I could ask, what plants give you the most bang for you buck?
What are your thoughts?
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Lettuces and spinach take little space and are easy to grow during the spring and fall.
Carrots and radishes can be planted pretty densely and radishes only take a month from seed to harvest so several crops can be planted in a season. I would often eat them right out the garden.
A couple of tomatoes are a must. They are more vertical space. At least a cherry (for eating in the garden) and a beefsteak for slicing. Buy or make big sturdy cages
Sugar snap peas are a favorite. Build a trellis for them to climb and they take little space.
Same goes for vine cucumbers.
Peppers and eggplants are pretty compact but I gave up on them after the flea beetles arrived.
Zucchini and yellow squash are big plants but you can get a big yield from one mound of plants.
Hope that helps.
-Brian
There are a lot of plants that are now compact and good producers. From everything like bush beans that don’t need to be staked to bush cucumbers that don’t spread out too much. Best bet is to go to your local nursery and ask them what they got. Many are more then happy to give you a hand at picking what will work best in your garden space. You may even want to look up container gardening as most of the plants used with it are compact and take give you a good harvest.
The Lawn Lady
For a small garden, you have to buy Bush Zucchini or Bush yellow squash. (They have a bush from rather than a running vine.) I get seeds for small garden items like this from Parkseed.com special because I only have an 8×8 garden. There’s also a bush cucumber pickle they sell suited to the small garden.
Regular bell pepper and all pepper type perform nicely in small space. Also tomatoes, bush beans, beets, radishes, various lettaces.
Parkseed.com sells a couple of breeds of "pot peppers" which will grow nicely in a large pot, which I like.
I also do well with broccoli, cabbage and brussel sprouts, which I grow during winter since I live in Florida. (I have two small gardens a year usually.)
Absolutely you cannot grow corn in the small garden. Or pumpkins or anytime type of running vine that require alot of space.
Ok first what kind of veggies do you like? Tomatoes put out alot and can be cotained in a cage, beans and peas take up little space cause there vines and grow up and put out alot, squash and also be trained to climb, which keeps it off the ground from bugs and easier to pick. Its just a choice of what you want to have fresh and alot of is all.
Tomatoes and zucchini are the most prolific by far. It’s a little too late for radishes (they get too hot), spinach and lettuce (they’ll blite), but they’re pretty cheap at the store anyway. Peppers will give you a lot, too, and only take about a foot or two of space, while tomatoes take 2-3 feet and zucchini take about 3. Carrots will give you a lot of seeds per packages, and you thin them to about 2" apart. The same is true for beets, onion sets, and Swiss chard, but the problem with these is that once you’ve used that one, it doesn’t reproduce, while with tomatoes, zucchini and peppers the one plant will keep producing all summer long.