Time to grow fresh food in your yard

Last week, I told you to boldly tear up your lawn and plant a garden. A simple 10-foot by 10-foot square in a sunny spot will do. But pots, buckets and whisky barrels with soil in them will also do.

Now, what do you want to grow?

You say, “Tomatoes!”

I say, “Trouble!”

You say, “Kale, salad greens, broccoli.”

I say, “Bingo!”

If you want a hard-to-grow, low-yield, high-maintenance crop and plan on disease, try growing tomatoes. You’ll need a greenhouse, a lot of space, trellises and particular soil nutrients.

For all that space, expense and work, most of your tomato fruits won’t ripen by the time frost hits in September. It’s a waste of food-growing space. You’re better off buying fresh organic tomatoes from the experts at the farmers markets. Let the professionals figure out the art of yummy, juicy perfection. The price is still cheaper than growing your own.

If want to grow fresh food, choose the greens and veggies that thrive in our cool weather and short season with little attention. Kale, for example, gives you continual harvest all summer. Kale will keep growing through the first snowfalls until the ground freezes. Besides being a heroic provider and yielder, kale packs super-high levels of calcium and iron for your nourishment, as well as vitamins A, C and K, plus powerful anti-cancer compounds. Check out dwarf blue curled Scotch kale, deep purple Siberian kale and dinosaur kale. Delight in trying kale’s other colorful shapes and tasty varieties. Kale is guaranteed to make you a successful grower!

Grow your salad greens to liberate yourself from boring and tasteless iceberg head lettuce. Blend the seed of red and green leaf lettuces, romaine and buttercrunch. Combine with mustard greens and mizuna. Then harvest the outside leaves for salad bonanzas of flavor, color and texture. Or, select a mesclun mix seed packet, plant rather thickly, and then savor your cuttings of tender baby greens with leaves full of zing and aliveness. Toss with parsley, dill and arugula. You can easily grow all of these, but don’t plant a full row in late May. The trick is to leave open space, then plant successively. Plant a few seeds every week for reaping continuous greens all summer.

What else can you grow with success and minimum effort? Broccoli (heads and side shoots), collards, cabbage, bok choi, beets and beet greens, cauliflower, Swiss chard, spinach. Grow your carbohydrates by planting potatoes. Potatoes give you more calories than grains per square foot of space, and there’s no gluten to worry about. It is the one crop moose won’t eat before you do.

So, choose your vegetables and make your plan. Will you grow in a garden plot or in a container?

“Either way of growing is a subversive act,” says Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International. Subversive means positive when you save grocery money, pick fresh and healthy food, and boycott produce shipped long distances from industrial farms. Welcome to a win-win revolution!

Your next challenge: will you start seeds indoors now, or buy transplants in May? Next time, I’ll coach you through both.

Ellen Vande Visse operates Good Earth Garden School and offers educational workshops through goodearthgardenschool.com.