Vegetables: a Gardener's Delight
In good times or bad, a vegetable garden fits the bill. Growing your own means you know what is on the final product label; you know if there are chemical additives in your salad. Your own vegetable garden allows you to decide whether you will share the potato crop with the Colorado potato beetle or choose to pick each bug by hand or apply chemicals for control. You will get a first hand lesson at crop production yields. Vegetable gardens can be found in the country and in the center of cities; they know no economic boundaries. They can be as large as you can tend, or as small as fits your needs. A vegetable garden can be found in an apartment balcony over looking a city center, in a pot on a back yard deck, or in a suburban landscape. Vegetable gardens can be laid out in straight rows or combined with flowers for cuttings; vegetable gardens are both productive harvest centers and ornamental creations of beauty. Cherry tomatoes can be planted among the flowers of summer, the varying colors of the fruits picked to eat right off the vine while tending to the daylilies or summer phlox.
Vegetable gardens are inclusive providing opportunity for children to participate, to grow radishes from seed, to plant pumpkins to care for until Halloween. Vegetable gardens are a family activity whether a single pot with parsley and herbs on a patio or a large adventure in the side garden of a home. Vegetable gardens are about sharing the excess of summer and winter squash sure to come when the harvest exceeds the plan. There is little more joyful than planting a seed and tending to its need and knowing in return that it will provide for maximum return with only minimal care. Just add sunlight, water and attention.
Now is the time to finish your plan; in Maryland potato planting comes on St Patrick’s Day and I will get ahead of the beetles this year for sure!
"Planting Dates For Vegetable Crops in Maryland"
http://www.hgic.umd.edu/_media/documents/hg16_000.pdf
