Welcome to the TBR Gardening Disscussion for the week of June 19th, 2016! This is the thread for all things gardening....
Sorry to have been absent a month in getting this thread off the ground, but a late spring, lots of rain, and early summer heat compressed things greatly. It has been lots of work getting over the 'May hump' of having everything planted, weeded, and harvested in the case of the salad greens.
We have had a fairly hot June, and with some timely rains things have begun to jump. Sweet corn is a couple of feet high, tomatoes are blooming, and melons are trailing. The peas are beginning to finish out, and the beans are beginning to bush up (in some cases trailing). Have had to do the occasional replanting, but germination on most things have done well this year.
Been giving thought on the direction of this thread, to make it targeted in it's focus. Since many are putting effort into self-sufficiency and homesteading these days for various reasons, one feature will be a 'Variety of the Week' that highlights those that are especially useful for food production.
The other will be discussion on techniques for maximum food production for larger family sized gardens, both from my own personal experiences and around the web.
So to get started, here is the Variety of the Week:
[img align=left width=100]https://www.theenglishgarden.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/goldensweet.png[/img] Golden Sweet Pea
Reputed to be from India, absolutely unique with it's purple flowers and bright golden yellow pods on vines that grow up to 6 ft. tall.
Golden Sweet has a high value in a producing garden in that it is one of, if not the only 'all purpose' pea - it can be used for shell peas, stir fry pods, or soup peas if left to dry on the vine. With a very sweet flavor it's one of the very best in the garden, yet is an excellent tasty soup pea as well. For the homesteader, it has the kind of versatility you want to get the most out of food production.
Sources of Golden Sweet are: Baker Creek, Seed Savers Exchange, Johnny's, Territorial
On that note, in terms of food production, the starting point is choosing varieties. We use our main garden as a year round source of food, so there is nothing that we grow for fun or novelty. In the homestead mindset, everything grown in the main garden has to have a purpose for building the pantry till the next spring. In that context, here's what we look for in a variety:
Productivity
Storability (canning, freezing, drying, root cellar, etc)
Days to maturity (a high earliness/productivity ratio)
Growth habit
Tolerance (wet, dry, cold, heat, etc)
Versatility (can you get more the one crop, does it have a long production time, or does it overwinter well)
Growth needs (heavy feeder, requries trellis or cage, season specific, or needs shielded from the sun)
Palatability
Nutritional value
Medicinal value (particularly in the case of herbs)This will be explored in upcoming threads, but this is a general overview of the method we use for selecting varieties that will fit our food production needs. Attached is our Garden Plan and Seed Inventory to see what we grow and how, and again we can delve into the specifics as time goes along.
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