What are the Top 10 Plants in Your Garden?

[SpearBrave]

This thread is very simple you just list the top 10 plants your grow or would like to grow and why.This list could include flowers, fruit trees or whatever you like.

Have fun

Here are mine.

1. Cabbage- the reason we plant so much cabbage is because pound for pound it produces the most and it stores well(sauerkraut).

2. Tomatoes- we plant these because we like to eat them and they can be used in many dishes plus we can them.

3. Green Beans- another food crop that we grow and store through canning

4. Salad Greens- this includes lettuce, Swiss chard, mesclun mix,and spinach.

5. Pickle Type Cucumbers- we love pickles and we also trade or give away a few hundred quarts every year.*

6. Carrots- good crunchy carrots always make you feel good and they go with about anything.

7. Potatoes- although we are not currently growing them I would like to add them to my garden( I ran out of time this year).

8. Peppers- hot peppers, green peppers all kinds of peppers they are great to add to dishes.

9. Peas- over the years we have really started liking the snap and snow peas we even eat them raw.

10. Beets- we grow these to make pickled beets with spices and vinegar.

This are just the top 10 things we grow we also grow other things like squash,eggplant,turnips, herbs and others.

* since selling your home grown products could soon be illegal in the U.S. we use the term trade

[ladybright]

Another good thread. Most of these are top 10 for me as well.

1. Cabbage- the reason we plant so much cabbage is because pound for pound it produces the most and it stores well(sauerkraut).

2. Tomatoes- we plant these because we like to eat them and they can be used in many dishes plus we can them.

3. Green Beans- another food crop that we grow and store through canning

4. Kitchen herbs- they often have both culinary and medicinal uses. Mint, lavender, rosemary, garlic, lemon balm, sage, globe basil, oregano, marigold, cress.

5. Pickle Type Cucumbers- we love pickles and never have any to give away come yuletide.

6. Carrots- good crunchy carrots always make you feel good and they go with about anything. Yup,

7.Apple trees- flowers, apples, twigs for smoking meat.

8. Roses- for their beauty, rosewater, cooking, bath uses and rosehips for vitamin c.

9. Peas- So yummy sweet and crisp from the shells

10. Rutabega/Swede and Parsnips- yummy and in a lot of old recipes.

[MountainGuardian]

I love to grow Garlic it will grow just about everywhere, I have been adding a new patch in here every year, I have two patches out in the forest now. I love fresh garlic greens, I can harvest greens from the garlic all summer long and then still harvest the garlic in the fall.

Second best here is growing radishes, another favorite of mine.. I like radishes because we have very long drawn out winters here, it is not uncommon for us to get snow clear to the end of June. Radishes thrive in this weather, I use the greens all spring long in salad and then harvest the radishes before the weather turns hot. I can often get two complete radish cycles before the weather turns hot.

Third here would be potatoes, mmmmm I love potatoes... I had plants last year that when I pulled them up I had up to 30 potatoes attached to the root system of many of the plants. I then let the kids dig for more potatoes and they get to eat all they find...

Fourth here is not actually a garden plant but a weed, but we eat a lot of it, we call it Lambsquarters here, it tastes a little like spinach. It grows like crazy here everywhere and we eat about 100 to 200 pounds of it each year, the stuff makes the best stir fry I have ever eaten, it is also very good in salad or just walking around grazing on it...lol

Fifth here would have to spinach, spinach grows very well here in the cool springs and it is hard to beat fresh spinach.

Sixth is lettuce, it does not grow all that well because we cannot water it, but what we get is very very good.

Seventh is rose hips, not actually a garden plant I guess but a very good and tasty thing to eat, we have thousands of rose bushes in the forest here and we harvest a lot of rose hip each year, it is quite good to just eat when it is ripe enough and also makes good tea.

8th would have to be Elderberry, again not really a garden plant but we harvest several hundred pounds of it each year from about 120 trees we have growing in the forest. We make jelly, syrup and Mead from it. We also mix them into pancakes and breads.

9th would be wild blackberries, I am slowly cultivating the native plants and increasing the number and area of them, as well as the thimble berry patches we have..

10th would have to mint and peppermint, I have a large patch of peppermint in the front forest, and I have a huge patch of horse mint back in the middle ravine forest, I also have some regular mint that grows on its own wild in the back forest, but it doesnt always come up every year. We use mint in desserts and different foods, we also use some in salads and we make a great deal of tea from it.

I would really like to be able to grow cabbage here but I as yet, have never had any luck with that, anyone here good at growing cabbage, I literally eat about 2 to 3 heads a week myself, and I would really like to be able to grow it.

[SpearBrave]

^What varieties are you trying to grow, if you have a short growing season than I would say either Dutch Flats or Copenhagen. The other thing you might want to check is your soil ph to see if it is compatible with cabbages.

Funny, because I am getting ready to till a new area for cabbages tomorrow. It is not a good idea to plant cabbages in the same spot every year.

[MountainGuardian]

I have no idea really of soil ph... This land has been used and abused for just over 100 years since it was homesteaded. About all that is left is pure clay in the field areas, we still grow good crops of wheat, barley and hay on it though... I have five acres here around the house where I grow gardens, I have added about 300,000 thousand pounds of manure and old hay to the ground over the last 7 years, it is starting to grow well, but as of last year I still had no luck with the cabbage. Each year I plant my garden in a different area here around the house, I build a new goat pen each summer and then use the old area for growing garden. I have started making chicken pens in the form of greenhouses, I house chickens in them in the winter and let them free graze spring and summer, then in spring I plant in the soil I have in the floor of the buildings, I am going to try planting some cabbage next wek in one of the chicken greenhouses, I will try the varieties you suggested...

Thank you..

[MountainGuardian]

It is still freezing solid here every night and still freezing through the day often times, most of the snow is gone at the moment, there is a few inches left on the north faceing slopes right now.

I was wondering if I gave a good cover of hay and mulch if I could possibly plant directly outside while in freezing temps and likely snow... We only have moisture in the ground during spring basically, it becomes near desert dry in the summer here.

My problem with gardens has always been that it drys out about a month after it becomes warm enough to plant, I have been trying to come up with ways to plant earlier and take advantage of the extra water available in spring, so far I have not fared well..... hoping I can afford to put in a well this year, but that 10,000 to 12,000 dollars is a tough nut to crack...

[SpearBrave]

Cabbage can take a medium to heavy frost, not a full freeze. You can get a farmers almanac for your area and it will give you prediction for the last killing frost for your area.

Example would be for my area this year the last killing frost is predicted for April 15 and I am planting cabbages and other frost hardy plants next week.

I forgot if you do have success than you may want to look at this thread.
http://forums.skadi.net/showthread.php?t=134204

[Rocky v]

As we live in a desert we will probably plant this weekend. We live in the city and only have a small plot.

Tomatoes

Few peppers of various varieties

Lettuce

Carrots

Beets-now coming up from last years seeds

Basil-takes over

Pumpkins-they really take over

Green onions

Sugar peas

Will try cabbage and see how it does here.

[Vindefense]

My favorite things to grow are cucumbers, I build trellises to let them climb and my children love watching them grow. I usually start tomatoes and peppers from seed but this year I am going to buy them already established. For veggies we also grow squash (acorn and butternut), bush beans, carrots, broccoli, eggplant (for my wife) and asparagus (for me).

For greens, my favorite is spinach and my wife's is endive and Romain lettuce. We also grow about a dozen different herbs.

No tubers, but this year we are going to try to plant onions and garlic.

There is also a very long flower garden that grows all the way down my driveway, which is about 100 ft long and 12 ft deep where one can find different varieties of the irris, roses, tulips, daffodils, and other various wild flowers, annuals and perennials. Wild bramble grows all over here as well and in the summer I harvest blackberries, raspberries and boysenberries and make cider, mead and jam. Oh, and last year I put in a small strawberry patch about 40 sq ft and planted some blueberry bushes.

The edible nut trees on my property are black walnut, and hickory. The only fruit trees we have though is one pear tree, that I will be using to make pear mead this spring. That's it, and we love growing/harvesting it all.

[MountainGuardian]

Just something that we do here, some of you might find fun...

In the winter I am always wanting fresh greens, so I plant all kinds of stuff in the house, we grow garlic greens, ginger greens, beans,carrot greens and a lot of other stuff in the house in winter...

The garlic I just put in soil and let it sprout out to a foot and a half tall or so and then harvest it, the clove disappears and all there is is the green but makes a very tasty salad green.

I also plant ginger root, the root slowly disappears but you get plenty of fresh ginger greens which are very good in soups..

Carrots, I plant a carrot and the same the root slowly disappears but it makes a lot of greens which are very good as a spice, in soups or in salads.

I have also done this with onions, mmmmm onion greens are great

With beans we have actually grown vines that cover the ceiling in the kitchen, the kids love watching them grow because they grow quickly and they are totally amazed when we harvest all the beans in January, it is fun being able to walk in to the kitchen and pick a bean and eat it fresh from the vine. I use the bean leaves in salads as well.

After the beans are done I usually plant potatoes in those containers and we are able to harvest potatoes in about april..