My first plant of the year has arrived, a ‘Goldcot’ Apricot Dwarf from Stark Bros, and I need to sing their praises.

I’ve talked up Stark Bros before, mentioning them as my favorite place to get fruit trees, but they beat themselves in quality this time. This dwarf apricot was around 4 feet tall, and nicely branched already. Considering it is a dwarf, that is a really nice size to get. The branching is important as well. Often you’ll get trees that aren’t much more than a trunk, and since fruit comes off tertiary branches that typically means three years of growth. With primary branches already perfectly in place (this is what I mean by nicely branched, Stark’s employees perfectly pruned the branches to create well spaced and angled primary scaffolds), it could fruit sooner. The yield won’t be large, but it’ll be something.

The tree also had really nice sized roots, and judging by the condition, it looks as if the tree had been dug and the soil washed off mere hours before delivery, obviously, thats not possible, but it looked so good I’m sure that almost no time passed between when they dug it at their nursery and when they had it sent out. This is important. Some places might dig weeks before sending, which can really hurt a plant (or kill it), so Stark’s seemingly super-quick time is a huge benefit.

If you need a specialty fruit tree, I highly recommend Stark’s as a place to shop.

Now, about the tree. Apricots are one fruit that really really benefits from allowing to ripen on the tree. They are picked, pretty immaturely, to be shipped to supermarkets because once ripe they have very little shelf life. By growing your own you can let them ripen and get a much superior fruit (actually, most fruit benefits from this IMO). I picked a dwarf variety because I didn’t want a big tree, I picked the ‘Goldcot’ one because it was bred here in Michigan so I knew it could take the winter. I also got the tree for my wife (yes, by the way, I am a man, I saw myself quoted on another blog today and I was referred to as “she”), I think apricots are alright, but she really loves them, and I’m a good husband, so I bought her a tree.

I also turned the process of planting into a how-to tutorial: How to Plant a Bareroot Tree.

Related posts:

1. Apricot Tree Update
2. Fall is for planting….. Fruit
3. Gardening Catalogue Deluge; What to Plant?

There can be no discussion, the Japanese iris is superior, in fact, I think I hate bearded irises now, and they used to be my favorite flower.

Bearded Irises, Falling Down on the Job

So, seriously, what kind of slob falls down on the job? The bearded iris, thats who! These beautiful flowers used to be my favorite flower when I was a novice gardener, they were big, interesting, flowers, and I liked big, interesting, flowers. But when I became more experienced and discriminating I realized all the shortcomings these plants have.

The tall bearded irises that are so popular cannot stand up to wind or rain, their scapes cannot support their flowers and any outward pressure will permanently damage the plant to the point where the flowers will adorn the ground.

They also don’t have the longest bloom time, big flowers are nice, but they could stick around longer. They also are finicky bloomers, sometimes they can just quit blooming until you divide them.

They also have ugly as sin foliage. Seriously, tall bearded irises have some of the most ugly foliage of any garden perennial. They look find when young, but as they age (where most plants improve) they get ugly. Big bald spots in the middle of a clump, so ugly. Yes, you dig and divide and try to give away the extras to family and friends who run in horror from yet-another-iris. This doesn’t excuse the fact that an iris put in the ground merely 3 years ago is going to be ugly this year.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the foliage is a nice bluish color, but it is just too sparse.

Japanese Irises, Fixin’ Whats Broken

Now lets compare with the Japanese irises. They have very tall (3-4 foot) clumping foliage that stays in a clump, looking like gladiolus, a bigger siberian iris, or a daylily on steroids. The foliage is attractive, and works really well at the back of a border. Additionally, there are variegated varieties.

The flowers of a Japanese iris are big, perhaps bigger than a tall bearded iris, they don’t really have much in the way of standards, but they have huge falls, they also in my experience last a little longer. Finally, they bloom later, around the same time as lilies, which is great. Lilies lack a strong purple color, and irises have that in loads. They’re of a height with lilies as well. So you can plant some purple Japanese irises next to some red lilies and have a really nice combination.

Did I mention they’re sturdy? Perhaps it is the clumping action that adds stability, but I’ve never had one fall over.

There isn’t as much variety available in the Japanese iris, but perhaps that is because they’re not as common, as people request them more, which they should, more varieties may be introduced.

In anycase, I can’t see a situation in the future where I would put a new bearded iris in my garden, and in fact will probably tear out more of the ones that are there currently. In contrast, I fully intend to plant more Japanese irises.

Related posts:

1. ‘Eden’s Paintbrush’ Japanese Iris
2. Irises Not Going Dormant
3. Bonkers over Buddleia

As I sit here eating an amazing pear from my garden (despite recent wounds to my pear tree) my advice to you is to plant fruit.

It isn’t just because fruit trees save you money in the long run with free produce. But you simply get a better quality item than what you buy in the store. See, for many types of fruit, letting it ripen on the tree makes it infinitely better. Fully ripe fruit though spoils quickly and bruises easily and so doesn’t ship well, meaning, you can’t get it at the supermarket.

I leave my pears on my tree until they’ve turned a little yellow, and most importantly, their flesh gives when I poke a finger at them. At this point they’re perfectly ripe, and a dream to eat. They’ll last at most a day or two on the counter before they are overripe, but man are they good. Canned pears are of course good because they are seeped in heavy syrup. Imagine if you will, a pear that has that syrup on the inside, that is what you get when you leave them to ripen on the tree.

Pears are of course not the only fruit (or veggies for that matter) that tastes better when left to ripen on the tree or plant. Most fruits become sweeter this way, for particulars I’ve heard very good things about apricots.

Now, you don’t need a big yard or a big wallet to plant a fruit tree. I remember a conversation with my Dad a couple years ago where he said he thought fruit trees cost $200 each, no, they don’t. I was just at Home Depot and they had them for $12.99, and these are 5-6 feet tall, and could likely bear lots fruit in 3 years (my pear tree originally came from Lowes, I paid like $18 for it, I planted it in the Spring of 2004. In 2005 I got like 1 pear, in 2006 like 5, this year I got like 40). Some will tell you to pick immature fruit off younger trees to help them grow bigger, this is true if you’re running a commercial orchard. For the backyard gardener though, you don’t necessarily want your tree to grow brigger, and so let those fruits ripen and eat them.

And yes, you can keep a fruit tree small. Now your Lowes or Home Depot or even typical garden centers may not have a huge selection of dwarf or semi-dwarf hybrids, but they’re out there. My favorite source for fruit trees is StarkBros.com they have a huge variety, they send good plants, and most importantly, they have dwarves and semi-dwarves of nearly every type of fruit. If you have four square feet of garden you can grow a dwarf fruit tree believe it or not. They really don’t require a lot of room.

Another complaint is that fruit trees are messy, well, yes, they drop bad fruit, much of which will be destroyed by critters and inedible. Get yourself a compost tumbler or compost bin for all that extra stuff, or just feed it to the wildlife. We have a big old fat groundhog that lives under our shed and eats our pears. Which is fine by me, better him than something else. He’ll grab a pear and it it like a human eats corn on the cob, its amusing to watch.

For the record, I have a relatively small yard, and I have… 1 pear tree, 1 apple tree, 1 cherry tree, 2 grape vines, 2 hardy kiwi vines, a raspberry patch, a strawberry patch, a blueberry patch, and an asparagus patch (thats just in and around my ornamentals, that doesn’t even count my vegetable garden). Plus, I’ve ordered a dwarf apricot from Stark’s for planting next Spring. You don’t need a lot of room for these.

Related posts:

1. Kudos to Stark Bros
2. Pear Tree Down
3. Asters or Mums for Fall Color?

First, a little bragging. This picture was taken like the second week in July. I picked my first raspberry on July 5th and within a week I was harvesting a quarter pound a day or more from this 8′x4′ patch. What I want to show off though is the height. Look at those canes. That one big one in the middle has to be 8 feet tall atleast, and it has grown more since I took this picture. I’ll need a ladder to harvest.

Anyways, as you can see in my other blog posts linked to below, I grow my raspberries in a raised bed. This is because they spread with underground runners. This is both a good and a bad thing. They spread so rapidly that you can get a large planting in no time, and you can dig up the runners and give them to friends. On the other hand, they can take over and start growing in areas they do not belong. So, I put them in raised beds, now I’ve got pipe culverts buried slightly into the soil (click the link, those are the same exact plants, 2 years early, crazy huh? also, my hardy kiwi on the fence behind them has grown a lot as well), and I had those for a year, then I got the plastic faux rock raised bed stuff to put around them to make them look nicer (the culverts are still there, just hidden), and I backfilled with lava rock. This keeps them well enough contained so I don’t get runners going into nearby areas (though sometimes a fallen berry still germinates).

Many places I’ve seen say raspberries product only on new wood and to cut them back every year. This makes no sense to me, all mine produce on both new and old wood. One year old canes start producing in July, new growth canes start producing in August usually, that is for me here in Zone 5. If I cut them back every year I’d have to wait until August to get any berries, and would miss a whole month of .25 or .5 pounds per day of harvests.

Now, the 1 year old canes are slightly less productive their second year, but they still produce, and that is kinda crazy if you think about it. The volume of berries I’m getting now is so high.. and since it is all 1 year old canes it isn’t even peak yet.

Two year old canes always die for me, so ya, cut those back. You’ll be able to well in fall or very early spring which ones are dead and need removal.

Raspberries are expensive at the store because they do not ship well and so they’re one of the most money saving crops you can grow at home. They are relatively carefree, will take drought and poor soils fine. The berries are prone to rot in damp conditions though so they may not be appropriate for areas with heavy rainfall. Full sun is best, but part sun will work. The only pest I’ve ever noticed on them is japanese beetles, which are easy to control once you identify them as your problem. If they need water they’ll let you know with slightly droopy leaves, but that rarely happens thanks to their well established perennial bush root system. As for fertilizer, I started mine off with good soil, but I don’t fertilize them at all. The thorns also keep all but the most desperately hungry deer or rabbits away.

Raspberries are extremely healthy to eat, put them in cereal, smoothies, make sauces and jams and jellies and crisps and pies. I’m canning this year for the first time simply because of the volume of berries I have.

Raspberries are so healthy, so hardy, so easy, in fact that I think they should be grown in vacant lots in inner cities to provide a source of fresh fruit to needy families. Why not? The land is there. Stick them on road medians, anywhere, everywhere, feed America, one berry at the time. You can even make a tea out of the leaves.

So, maybe I’m a little crazy about them, but they are the best food crop I’ve ever grown.

Related posts:

1. Save Money, Grow Raspberries

Posts, poles, supports, columns, whatever you want to call them, we all have them, we all need them. They hold things up. In my case, a large bird house. Why not pretty them up a little bit and grow things on them?

Rather than buying an expensive (comparatively) trellis from the “trellis section” at the Home Depot, or going the more permanent option of pounding dozens of nails into the post to act as supports, you can simply get a trusty pair of tin snips and snip off a (for a 4×4 post) 18 inch or so section of fencing. You may need two 18 inch sections depending on the height of the fence and the post area you want to cover (stacking them on top of each other) then simply wrap it around the post and secure it with the loose wire ends created when you made your cuts. Voila, a cheapo trellis that will soon be invisible behind a mountain of flowers and foliage. Then, if you ever tire of it, you simply remove it, and the post is no worse for wear.

I do this with clematis, as you can see in the picture. The vine is simply planted at the base of the pole and climbs it mostly by itself, I only have to do a little guiding, and that is usually limited to just tucking wayward stems into a section of the wire frame. The vine you see in the picture is just 1 year old, so not yet at full coverage, plus, it is still May here in zone 5, we had frost last night (grrrrr), so the growth it has is really impressive considering. I expect it to achieve full coverage by the end of the season.

You can also do this with morning glory readily, as well as any other flowing vine that doesn’t get too woody or large. For instance, I wouldn’t do this with trumpet vine or wisteria, think smaller, those both get too big.

No related posts.

Oil & Ethanol

First, why are food prices going up? Two reasons, oil and ethanol. Oil prices reached $130 a barrel today on the back of demand from developing countries, weakening supply, and speculation. Everything that is transported by truck has mirrored oil in price increases. It costs more to transport the food from the farm to the market, it costs more to farm the food because tractors run on gas, and so the food goes up in price.

The second reason is a woefully misguided ethanol policy pushed on us by Democrats and most Republicans in Washington, and this is such an important issue I am going to talk about it a little. From President Bush to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, most politicians have caved to big agribusiness lobbying and supported corn ethanol mandates and subsidies. Only a few people such as Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and of course John McCain have been vocal against it, going way back. McCain to the point of ceding the Iowa Primary to his competitors rather than pander to big agribusiness. Even if you disagree with his other policy positions, you have to give him props for being the only presidential hopeful from either party to go to Iowa and say that he doesn’t support corn ethanol subsidies and mandates.

The problem with corn based ethanol is that it is a waste of time, money, and increases food prices. Seriously. Consumer Reports did a comparison with one of those flex fuel cars that can take gasoline or E85 Ethanol. Since ethanol has less potential energy than gasoline they got fewer miles per gallon with it. To the point of about 30%. So, 10 gallons of gasoline will get you 30% farther than 10 gallons of E85. Or, with E85, you use 30% more fuel to go the same distance.

Then, corn is an extremely labor intensive and resource intensive crop to grow. With high fertilizer needs and complex machinery you only get about 1.3 gallons of ethanol for every 1 gallon of gas spent harvesting it. So combine the two issues together and you’ve got about 0 in fuel savings.

So we’re spending all this money on subsidies and having a government mandate that doesn’t actually result in better, cheaper, or cleaner fuel. But, what we are getting, is more demand for fertilizer, which increases the price of fertilizer, more demand for arable land, which increases the price of arable land, and more demand among the land for ethanol corn plantings, which increases the premium other plantings (ie food) need to achieve, and all of that results in higher food prices.

The really scary thing, none of this is recent news. I was reading articles on ethanol’s problems as a “solution” back in 05. I wish congress had read the same ones. Also, I don’t mean to say all ethanol, ethanol made from switchgrass for instance (which grows like a weed) gets something like 5-8 gallons for every gallon spent, much, much, better than 1.3 from corn, and yet we’ve got this corn mandate. Fishy? You bet.

So write your representatives in Washington and tell them to kick the corn ethanol habit.

So, what to plant?

In the meantime, back to gardening, so you want to plant food to save money, good idea, even people with small yards can plant enough to save a few hundred dollars a year at the grocery store, and with medium yards you can easily put that into 4 figures at current ridiculous prices (oh yes, this week I spent $2 for a single zucchini).

When evaluating what plants to grow for money savings you need to consider a few different issues. How easy is the plant to grow? How much does the food you get from the plant cost at the store? How well does the food product keep? How much of the food can your family eat? How much space do the plant needs? Do you get significantly better quality when growing it yourself? And finally, what grows best in your area?

How easy is the plant to grow?

Time is money, water is money, fertilizer is money. If you’re gardening as a hobby some of these things do not matter, but if you expect to save money by gardening they do, and so how easy a plant is to grow matters. This includes planting, harvesting, watering, fertilizing, soil requirements, etc.

How much does it cost at the store?

This should be obvious, you get better value growing more expensive things. If you have a 10 sq/ft plot and can grow two plants that will yield say 20 pounds total, then it is better to grow the plant that costs $3 per pound at the store than the plant that costs $2 per.

How well does the food keep?

Foods that go bad quickly require expedited shipping to reach the market, which is more expensive, so they tend to be priced at a premium at the store. On the other hand, if the food goes bad quickly it may be hard for your family to eat it all when the harvest comes due, so consider that when deciding how much of a food to plant.

How much can your family eat?

This ties into the previous one. There is no point planting an acre of eggplants if your family doesn’t eat them or can’t eat that many. When you buy a packet of seeds and there are 100 seeds in there, it doesn’t mean you need to plant all 100, plant 2 or 3 and save the rest for the next year, that way you’ll have the room to plant a larger variety of plants.

How much space do the plants need?

We don’t all have full fields in our backyards, when you’re limited on room veggies that can be planted densely will tend to provide a greater value than those that need more space.

Do you get better quality when growing at home?

Many plants are picked before fully ripe to be sent to the store, and so they never get as sweet as they can be. Or, some plants once picked instantly start converting sugars to starch, and so are never as sweet at the market as they are when just picked. This isn’t really a money saving issue, but can factor into your decision of what to plant.

What grows best in your area?

Hot peppers are expensive at the store, but I wouldn’t think of planting them up here in Michigan, they need hot weather to grow and we don’t have a lot of it. If I plant something that tolerates cooler temperatures I could get two, maybe even 3, harvests in a year. Many veggies you can harvest after 50 or 60 days, so if April and September are warm I could get 3 plantings in. Likewise, a plant that requires lots of water shouldn’t be planted in the southwest as you’ll be spending to water it throughout the year.

Some planting ideas

My favorite money saving plant is raspberries. Raspberries are expensive at the store because they do not keep or ship well. They produce for months and months all summer, and keep producing until October usually for me. My 4×8 mature raspberry patch probably makes me around $5 a day during the peak of the summer in free fruit. They are perennial bushes so you only need to plant them once and they will grow forever. They also spread like mad so if you want them to cover a larger area you can buy fewer plants originally. Berries are also extremely good for you, high in antioxidants and vitamins, fiber, etc. If you have too many, you can easily make jam and can them, once canned they’ll keep for a year. Raspberries handle drought, poor soils, do not need fertilizer, and produce tons of fruit. Blueberries have very particular growing requirements. Strawberries, because of their short stature, do not give you as much food per sq/ft. Raspberries are the superior berry for the home garden.

Another favorite of mine is asparagus. Asparagus is one of the very few perennial vegetables, plant it once and harvest it for decades, so it doesn’t require a lot of time commitment. It is also fairly expensive at the store, and it is one of those that is best when first picked, because once it is picked it starts converting sugars into starch and fiber. Corn is also best when first picked for the same reason. However corn does take more work, and space, and fertilizer, and so isn’t going to be a good choice for everyone (but if you have the room, maybe give it a try).

Any food you can get from a tree is going to end up being cheap in the long run, if you can be patient. $20 for a tree now and in 5 years you may start getting some food from it, in 10-20 years you’ll be feeding yourself and all your neighbors, but that is long term. Nuts of all types are of course expensive at the store, and most of the country can grow walnuts and pecans, but fruit too can be a good option. Dwarf apple, pear, or cherry trees can fit in even the smallest yards, and letting those fruits ripen on the tree makes them very sweet.
Leafy green veggies such as chard or mesclun mixes can be good to grow. They don’t keep well so they’re expensive at the store, they can be grown in cooler in weather, and they can be harvested repeatedly. When you want a salad, you go out and cut enough just for that salad, the leaves grow back, and the next time you want a salad, you have more to harvest.

Onions can be a great crop to grow for a few reasons. The big ones are now around $2 each at the store, whereas you can buy a bag of 100 onion sets for $2. So, plant them all, and you’ll make around $200, not bad. Onions, being bulbs, can handle cold weather, you can get them started early in the year, or plant them later. Onions, also because they’re bulbs can be planted close together, 4-6 inches apart. You can literally tuck them in any free nooks in your garden. You can also grow them in containers. Right now I’ve got 4 or 6 big pots full of onions because it is still too early to plant annuals or other tender plants in them, but I’ll be harvesting those onions in June at which point I will be able to plant something else in those places.

My final pick is hard squash, butternut or spaghetti. I used to hate squash, but all I knew of it was some horrid dishes passed at a relative’s thanksgiving. After learning different recipes, ways to prepare it, spices that compliment it, I like it. Squash does take a bit of room, but you can’t beat the storage. Keep it in a cool, dry, and dark place and hard squashes will keep for a year, I’ve even heard of longer than that. They’re also very healthy, high in beta carotene and fiber. So there is no worry about being stuck with a huge harvest you cannot eat, that one harvest can be eaten over the course of a year.

Succession Planting

My final tip to the home gardener looking to save money by growing their own food is to make use of succession planting. This means planting in stages, over the course of weeks, so that you’re also able to harvest in stages, over the course of weeks. By making sure all your food doesn’t need to be harvested at the same time you make it easier to ensure that you have time to eat it all when it is ready to be harvested.

Related posts:

1. Save Money, Grow Raspberries
2. Gardening Catalogue Deluge; What to Plant?
3. Your Garden, The Most Local Food of All

The main advertised benefit of colored mulches is that they keep their color and so you don’t need to replace them as often. Personally, that doesn’t fly with me. I don’t lay down new mulch for coloring reasons, I do it to maintain a good thickness of 2-3 inches.

I do, however, use colored mulches sometimes in some places. I use them for their colors, as just another design element. You might plant a purple smokebush around some golden variegated hostas and it would look good with the foliage colors contrasting. You can achieve the same thing, and do more, by adding colored much into the area. So now you can contrast the plants against each other, and the mulch.

You can also contrast mulch with itself. My raised asparagus beds are covered in red mulch, and the ground level beds surrounding them are covered in gold mulch. It works.

This post though, this post is about black mulch, the post title I’m sure seems impossible. How could someone as dark as black brighten up a shady area? But what have I been discussing so far? Contrast. So, lets discuss contrast and shade.

Most flowering plants that do well in shady environments produce lackluster flowers, or atleast those that cannot compete with their sun loving cousins. In contrast (ahem), the foliage of plants that do well in shady areas tends to be spectacularly colorful with shades of golds and reds and blues, and of course greens.

However, foliage rarely rivals flowers for color, so make it pop, you need contrast. The most popular way to get contrast is to put clashing plants next to each other. A red-green plant looks crimson when planted next to a yellow-green plant (which itself ends up looking bright). Contrast helps to highlight the differences between the plants, making both look brighter and more vibrant.

So, since black is the ultimate contrast creator, adding black mulch to your shady areas might just brighten them up when paired with lighter colored plants.

Give it a try. I did, and as you can see in the picture (which by the way is Hosta ‘Great Expectations’ underneath my red laceleaf Japanese maple), I think it works.

Related posts:

1. 60 Bags of Mulch
2. Golden Yellow Ground Cover for Shade
3. Edible Ornamentals

But finally, things are waking up, and up first of course, are crocuses. So I get to see the results of the in-lawn plantings I did last fall.

Planting crocus in your lawn is a great way to plant more flowers without having to make more garden beds. The bulbs sit below your sod, the crocus foliage looks like grass, and by the time you need to mow, the flowers are done and it doesn’t hurt them.

You can naturalize your entire lawn, something I’d highly recommend if you’re putting in new sod or seeding for the first time after construction. You may need to shop around to find a distributor willing to sell you thousands of bulbs in bulk for relatively little cash but I think it’d be worth it. You would have, every Spring, a carpet of blossoms where your lawn should be. People will stop to take pictures, it would be beautiful.

For those of us with established lawns though, such a thing is possible, just much much much more work as we have to remove and then replace the sod.

What I did was just two small areas totaling probably 10 square feet together. I used an edging spade to cut the grass into squares of about 12 inches and then used a flat shovel to scoop them up in one piece. I then laid the crocus bulbs (technically corms) down on the exposed dirt, replaced the sod, and tamped down. It was a good deal of work, my sod was compacted and tough to dig, but I’m glad I did it. You’ll want to plant densely for a more powerful affect, so err on the side of too many bulbs rather than too few.

You will notice in the picture some dying grass, that is to be expected, the edges where you cut the sod will brown, but that should respond and fill in within a month or two in the Spring and of course be gone entirely in future years.

Probably when I buy a new house or otherwise have the opportunity to plant BEFORE sod is laid or seed is sown, I will plant thousands of crocus bulbs for huge swaths of color. For now though, I’ll enjoy what I’ve got.

Related posts:

1. My First Blooms

Though true, I am thinking about what I am going to plant this next year.

I do not have a lot of remaining room to plant anything, last year I made a whole new bed and so gained probably another 500 sq/ft of space for planting and got to buy a whole bunch of new plants, but I don’t have any more room for any more new beds and so I don’t think that’ll be happening again this year. Well, okay, there is one spot I might be able to put a bed if my wife let me, but I think I’d wait until 2009 to do that just to give her a little time to recover.

So I have to be very very selective with what I buy, I only have a few spots left. One thing I know I’m going to buy is another ‘Caramel’ heuchera from Wayside Gardens. I bought 16 last year to make a little hedge border and they look nice. But one that got more sun than the others died (these were marketed as sun loving heucheras, obviously they’re not, but since I do have 15 of them now and need to fill a gap I will buy one again despite the mismarketing). I also like their new ‘Tiramisu’ heuchera which I may get to plant underneath a red japanese maple, hoping the golden/yellow leaves will offset the japanese maple and make it pop. Currently I’ve got some heucherellas underneath it but they’re not as yellow as I’d like, more lime-green.

I also saw this picture of ‘Beni-kazi’ Japanese forest grass in a magazine and I find it very attractive. I do not know if I have a good spot for it yet, but I plan to think hard about it. The coloring is just so nicely unique. I would like to hear from anyone who grows it, please comment if you do.

Mostly though, I’m thinking about planting edibles.

We eat a lot of blueberries for health reasons, to the point where I buy pounds of frozen ones at a time. I’ve tried growing them in the past, but they’ve been hard for me. I think I over-acidified my soil in preparation and they didn’t grow well. Then the second winter the rabbits got them. Since the rabbits didn’t eat them the first winter I didn’t protect them the second winter. But, we do eat so much blueberries, I think I will try again. I have to dig up the bed anyways because one of my brick walls around it settled and is now uneven.

Really though, the one plant I am looking forward to growing, and the one plant I recommend all of you grow, is sweet corn. Now, hear me out. No, you don’t need a lot of space to grow corn. I am not asking you to grow a field of corn, I am asking you to grow one or two stalks, whatever you have room for. As I say in this post veggies can be ornamentals too and there is no reason why you can’t put 1 stalk of corn in a flower bed as a bit of vertical interest.

However, when I choose which vegetables to grow I have two main criteria. What will be cost effective to grow, ie which foods are expensive to buy, and which foods offer a nice improvement over store bought when you grow your own. See, food sold in stores is often grown for disease resistance, or shipability, but not flavor. So food you grow at home can very easy taste better, it isn’t just psychological either.

Corn, happens to fit both those bills. If you’ve never had fresh picked sweet corn you don’t know what you’re missing. Corn starts converting sugar to starch the second it is picked. Some foods ripen after picking, some foods however never are as sweet as they can be unless you grow them yourself, let them ripen on the plant until just perfect, and then eat immediately. Apricots are a good example with bland grocery store ones paling compared to home grown ones that are allowed to ripen on the tree, and corn is the same way. Some corn fanatics in fact will start the water boiling before picking the corn, seriously.

Corn is also becoming more and more expensive thanks to (perhaps misguided) the corn ethanol craze. Making ethanol from corn is a really inefficient use of resources, corn requires water, fertilizer, lots of labor and equipment, and you only get a net gain of something like 30% (energy in, energy out). Switchgrass ethanol, in comparison, grows without much water or fertilizer and gives a net gain of something like 800%. But the corn lobby has convinced the goverment to subsidize corn ethanol, which increases prices for almost all food, other veggies because less of them are being planted in favor of corn, most meats because corn is fed to cattle and as the fed price increases, so does the cost of raising cattle, and, most of all, corn itself. As the value of ethanol corn increases, sweet corn becomes marginalized and more expensive. So while it has traditionally been seen as cheap, this next year corn is expected to be ridiculously expensive.

So, I will be planting corn this year, maybe as much as 4 stalks, afterall I do not have much room. I recommend you do the same. You’ll get yourself a treat with the best corn you’ve ever tasted, and you’ll save some money at the grocery store.

Related posts:

1. Grow your own food to save money
2. My New Plant Wish List
3. Gardening, Cooking, and Making Your Family Healthier

Yes, I said it, vegetables in your ornamental beds. For some reason people see an ornamental bed as featuring eye-pleasing designs with organic layouts and nice flowers. Whereas a vegetable garden needs to have straight orderly rows like a farm.

Break out of that mold, some of the prettiest plants you’ll find are vegetables.

For instance, can anyone name an annual (or perrenial) for that matter that will grow to around 30 inches x 30 inches with wonderful blue-green foliage most closely matching a Colorado Blue Spruce that will also flower with nice light yellow blossoms? There are almost 0 perennials or annuals that produce blue foliage which can be a problem if you’re trying to use contrasting foliage colors. But you know what? Broccoli fits the bill nicely, and if you do not harvest the heads you can watch them mature into pretty yellow flower clusters.

So, plant some broccoli, it doesn’t have to be a whole row. 1 plant in the middle of your flowers can make a statement with it’s striking foliage. You might even get some food out of it.

Then what about swiss chard? Have you ever seen a plant that produces foliage as red as the stems and leaf veins from swiss chard? It is as vibrant a crimson as I have ever seen in the plant world. It makes a great foliage plant when placed among other plants, particularly those with yellow foliage.

Corn can provide a nice vertical statement, asparagus delicate fern-like foliage, pepper plants look gorgeous with their brightly colored fruits. There is a whole world of possibilities for attractive edibles out there, try planting one or two within your flower beds. They don’t need to be in orderly rows.

Related posts:

1. Using Plants with Contrasting Foliage
2. 60 Bags of Mulch
3. Three Simple Tips for a Beautiful Ornamental Garden Bed