You Can (and should) Eat Your Broccoli Leaves!

Today's update will be a quick one, but I think you'll also find it useful if you grow broccoli. I recently read an article about a "new" vegetable that Foxy, one of the major produce suppliers in the US, is marketing across the country called BroccoLeaf. It is, as the name suggests, simply broccoli leaves. A quick Google search will turn up dozens of entries about the product. As someone who loves cooking (and eating) I was intrigued. 

our first broccoli harvest of the season!

If you grow broccoli you know that there are a lot of leaves on the plant when it is fully mature, which means that there is a tremendous amount of produce that typically goes to waste (or the compost bin) if you only eat the florets. I wanted to see if the leaves could stand up as a real component of a meal and not just a small scale snack while working in the garden, so when we harvested our first batch of broccoli last night I decided to mix in several large leaves and sauté it all together with some butter and fresh herbs. In a word: incredible! The leaves taste like a milder, slightly less sweet version of the floret/stalk.

leaves, stalk, and florets ready for the saute pan!

You can count me among the many who never thought to eat the broccoli leaves, aside from munching on a few here and there while working in the garden. In retrospect, it's obvious! Being from the same family as kale and collards, it only stands to reason that broccoli leaves (which look a lot like collard leaves) would be not only edible but tasty and packed with nutrients.

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Until next time, happy gardening!

Crop List for the 2015 Garden!

For the 2015 garden I wanted to strike a nice balance between experimentation and utility. Since we found that peppers freeze amazingly well (you can read more about that here) I decided to increase our production of peppers this season. I also wanted to devote a sizeable portion of our container space to cooking greens, as we enjoy fresh greens on a regular basis. I have wanted to try melons for years now, so I found a really neat small heirloom melon that Thomas Jefferson grew at Monticello. It will be about the size of the Sikkim cucumber that I grew last season (you can read more about the Sikkim cucumbers from last season here).

an unusual crop...

So, without further ado, here is the 2015 crop list! Anything in blue is a variety I have never tried to grow before.

Tomatoes

Blue Beauty, 2 plants in one 12 gallon pot, 1 plant in a 5 gallon pot

Golden Sunray, 2 plants in one 12 gallon pot

Roma, 2 plants in one 12 gallon pot

Frosted Green Doctors Cherry, 2 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Black Cherry tomato, 2 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Peppers

Oda Pepper, 2 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Anaheim Chili, 2 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Poblano, 3 plants in one 12 gallon pot, 2 plants in one 5 gallon pot

Orange You Sweet, 2 plants in one 5 gallon pot

Cayenne, 2 plants in one 5 gallon pot

Biggie Chili, 2 plants in one 5 gallon pot

Fort Knox, 2 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Jimmy Nardello, 2 plants in one 5 gallon pot

Eggplant

Long Eggplant, 2 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Cooking Greens

Swiss Chard (mix of red and orange), 4 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Perpetual Spinach Chard, 5 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Vates Collards, 4 plants in on 7 gallon pot

Pink Chard, 4 plants in one 5 gallon pot

Kale, 4 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Cucumbers and Melons

Ananas D'Amerique A Chair Verte Melon, 4 plants in one 12 gallon pot

White Cucumber, 3 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Lemon Cucumber, 3 plants in one 7 gallon pot

Herbs (various containers)

Rosemary

Thyme

Purple and Green Basil

Marjoram

Parsley

Oregano

Catnip

Fenugreek

Chives

Cilantro

Sage

Miscellaneous Edibles (various containers)

Green Onions

Purple and Green Bush Beans

Broccoli

Beets

Meyer Lemon Tree

Flowers

Daddy Mix Petunia

Button Zinnia

Green Envy Zinnia

Dwarf Cosmos

Marigolds

In the coming weeks, I plan on spotlighting each of these crops with in-depth photos and more information about the containers and growing habits of each plant. It should be a great summer in the garden!

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Until next time, happy gardening!

Plant Peppers and Tomatoes Deep for Higher Yields and Stronger Plants

Plant deep. That is the best piece of advice I could give anyone who wants to grow healthier and more productive peppers and tomatoes. With tomatoes this is common knowledge among gardeners, and you won’t cause much of a stir by doing it. But anyone who has spent any amount of time reading a gardening forum knows that the topic of deep planting peppers can cause quite the debate. Many swear that peppers do not root from their stems, and that you will kill your plants because the stem will rot. This scares people away from trying it because of course they don’t want to risk killing their plants.

Peppers from early last summer... all planted deep and all very much alive!

Gardening is like any pursuit in that those who are passionate about it tend to have strong opinions. Just read a message board thread about organic vs. non-organic gardening for a quick primer on this. All I can speak to is my experience and the experiences of other successful gardeners who I trust. If your experience is anything like mine (and many other people who have practiced this method for decades) your pepper plants absolutely do root from their buried stems and do benefit from deep plantings just like tomatoes do. Eggplants benefit from deep planting as well. And why not? All three are members of the nightshade family, along with potatoes (which also should be buried as they grow for higher yields). It makes sense that they share similar growth habits.

loaded Jimmy Nardello plants from last summer

Deep planting of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants has a few major benefits. One is that more roots=more nutrient intake. The more nutrients a plant can take in, the more energy it has to do all of the stuff we want it to do (grow, branch out, produce fruit). In addition, more roots mean a stronger, sturdier plant in the wind. Each of those roots is an anchor that helps the plant avoid getting thrashed around in the wind. Finally, if you start seedlings indoors chances are that your plants are a bit leggy, which means they are very tall and thin due to the lack of sufficient light. They are literally reaching for the light! If you plant a leggy seedling at the same depth it was in its seed tray you will most likely have a top-heavy plant that could easily snap in a strong wind, which we get plenty of here in Buffalo.

Golden Sunray from 2015 garden.... stocky and already had a small tomato in late May!

So how do I plant deep? I simply remove the leaves from the lower 2/3 of a tomato or pepper plant, dig a hole deep enough to bury the plant about 2/3 of the way, and plant it. Don’t worry about getting it perfect; nature is tough, and gardening should be fun! If you forget to remove a leaf and it gets buried? DOOM! Actually, you won’t notice any difference; the leaf will just decompose in the dirt like the leaves that fall from the plant during the growing season do. Also, don’t sweat too much about exactly how deep you plant the seedling. Whether it is 40%, 50% or 70% buried the stem is going to produce more roots and the plant will be much stronger because of it than it would be otherwise. 

About those deep planted peppers… I have been deep planting all of my peppers for the past couple of years now. Far from sickly plants with rotten stems, the poblano plants last summer were about 5 feet tall, with thick tree-like stems. We are still eating cayenne peppers that we froze from last year’s garden. I grew 2 plants in a 5 gallon container. We just used the last of our aforementioned poblano peppers. I only grew 2 plants in one 7 gallon container. Remember, a plant is only as good as its roots, which is why a rich and well draining growing medium is essential for getting the results you want. Healthy roots=healthy plants. Having a lot more of those healthy roots makes a tremendous difference in the health and yield of your plants.

healthy plants=bigger yields... this is a 7 gallon container in 2013

I mentioned eggplants before. I often plant eggplants an inch or two deeper than the seedling trays, mostly because they tend to be stockier and tougher as seedlings and don’t really have a long stem to begin with. I typically plant them up to the base of the lowest leaves (without removing any). Sometimes though you will encounter a leggy eggplant seedling, and if that’s the case you can (and should) plant it just like a tomato or pepper.

more happy peppers from last summer's garden

Summer is well underway here in Western New York, and the garden is starting to really take shape! I look forward to sharing my adventures in container gardening with all of you for the next few months, and I hope your gardens are starting to bloom as well!

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Until next time, happy gardening!

First Update of the 2015 Season!

It’s been a hectic month or so, which is why I’ve been away from Captive Roots for a bit, but now that the garden is up and running look for a lot of updates in the coming months!

broccoli!

May was an adventure. We had two nights that dipped into the mid to low 30’s, which meant protecting plants from possible frost. There are two main ways to do this: cover them or bring them inside. One advantage of container gardening is that you can simply bring plants into a garage, living room, or other protected space overnight. Of course, you could always simply cover crops with bed sheets, empty pots, cardboard boxes, or plastic sheeting if moving them is not possible or feasible. The key thing is to keep the frost from touch the leaves. They will still be cold (plants aren’t warm blooded!) but it’s the surface freezing that ruptures their cells walls and destroys plant tissue. To be safe, we just brought our entire garden inside for the evening both times.

a plant slumber party!

Luckily, after a bout of cold nights it warmed right up, and things have been taking off in the garden! The peppers and tomatoes are really rolling, and the Golden Sunray tomato plant already has a couple of small tomatoes! We have already harvested collard greens and a bunch of herbs, and the kale is ready for its first harvest as is the orange and red Swiss chard. Here are some photos from the garden taken the last week of May.

Vates collards

daddy mix petunia

 

orange and red chard

In the coming months I will be updating the blog a few times a week. Sometimes it will be a quick photo update, sometimes a more involved post. This weekend will feature a list of garden crops for the 2015 garden and a quick post about why planting tomatoes and peppers deep is always the best strategy.

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Until next time, happy gardening