Starting Your Kitchen Garden While Social Distancing

With the pandemic keeping everyone at home this spring, you might be looking for something productive and stress reducing to do, either by yourself or with the kids. This might be the perfect time to start that kitchen garden you've always talked about wanting, but you might not know where to begin. Since I'm still relatively new to gardening myself, I know how important it is to have plants that won't die, will grow quickly, and will tolerate mistakes or weather changes. Of course, the pandemic complicates shopping right now, but if you have a sunny patio, balcony, or a backyard of any size you CAN start your kitchen garden while social distancing!

Baby lettuce growing in a pot.

First off, home improvement stores are essential businesses because you still have to fix broken toilets and replace fridges, so your local Lowe's or Home Depot is still open. Garden centers are usually not crowded on weekdays or evenings, so time a trip accordingly if you're going to shop. Make sure you get everything you want in ONE trip. You'll need soil (either potting or garden), containers if you're using them, seeds or starter plants (try a mix), some feed/fertilizer, and a hose or watering can if you don't have them already. Leave the kids at home for this part, practice good hygiene while you're out, and wash your hands often. Independent garden centers might also be open in your area, depending on your location, and the ones where I live are now offering curbside delivery and phone ordering, so try those if you want to support local businesses and minimize contact. Don't forget to buy stakes if you are going to grow climbing plants!

Basic Supply List:

* Soil (potting or garden or both depending on your plans)
* Containers (pots, a raised bed frame, grow bags, or whatever you want to use)
* Seeds or starter plants (seeds are cheaper but take longer)
* Feed/fertilizer (especially if you're planting in regular yard dirt!)
*Watering system (a watering can, a long hose, or even a soaker hose if you're getting serious)
*Stakes for climbing vine type plants
*If you don't have them - a shovel, a spade or two, gloves, other tools depending on your plans

Squash is fast and prolific!

The other big question for a new gardener is what to grow. You might be tempted in the current crisis to go full apocalypse homestead, but practically speaking you should keep things simple. Start with a couple of easy vegetables and a few hardy flowers to cheer you up as we all get through the next few months. Remember to grow vegetables your family will actually eat! For kids and anxious adults, the faster growing plants will provide maximum interest and comfort.

Basic Vegetables (buy as seeds or starter plants):

* Tomatoes - the top home veggie. If you haven't grown them before try a cherry or grape variety for larger yields and less disappointment when you lose a few fruits to critters. Remember to bury starter plants up to the first set of leaves!

*Squash and Zucchini - they grow fast and produce A LOT. Give them room to spread or train them to grow vertically on a cage. These are great for kids to grow and - hopefully - eat!

* Cucumbers - I had wilting issues with the heirloom varieties I started from seed this year, so go with disease resistant seeds or buy a starter plant. Give them support to grow vertically.

*Beans/Peas - These are fast growers and great for cooler climates where spring is slower to arrive, but if you live in a hot region go with cow peas like black eyes or purple hulls. They LOVE the heat. Remember that they will need stakes or other support!

*Lettuce - A cool weather plant, but great for containers, especially if you want to grow baby lettuce as a "cut and come again" crop. Start from seed and sow a container or a few rows; if you space out starting them you'll have a longer harvest.

*Radishes - My family won't eat them, but if yours will then radishes are super fast growers and small enough for patio and balcony containers gardens.

Daylilies ordered online from Oakes.

Basic Herbs (buy as small starter plants):

*Mint - you can't kill it! Don't plant it in the ground; put it in a container, or it will take over your yard forever. You can even buy live mint at the grocery store and plant that.

*Basil - you can also get it at the grocery store in small pots. Basil is great for pasta dishes and easy to care for in containers.

*Rosemary - The scent is wonderful, and it's also super easy to care for, so splurge on a rosemary plant even if you won't use it for cooking a lot.

Basic Flowers (buy as seeds or small starters):

*Sunflowers - These are GREAT for kids! Regular ones will get huge, so buy dwarf varieties if you have a small space. There are many different types to choose from.

*Marigolds - Also really easy to grow from seed, but you can get multi packs of small ones at garden centers very cheaply. They have a great scent and deter many pests in the vegetable garden. Regular varieties can get quite big and busy, so look for dwarf types if you want smaller plants.

*Daylilies - You cannot kill them. Plant them in sunny spots in the yard, in containers, wherever. Look for cheap rebloomers like Stella D'Oro or Happy Returns for maximum enjoyment.

*Wildflower mixes - If you want to attract pollinators to brighten your home isolation, try scattering a wildflower mix in a sunny spot. The flowers will help bring bees and other helpful insects to the garden so that your vegetables get pollinated. Some flowers in the mix will grow better than others, but that's OK.

Remember that you can also buy seeds and other garden supplies online from a wide variety of providers. I use Oakes Daylilies, Baker Creek Seeds, and Holland Bulb Farms, but be aware that some seed companies like Baker Creek might be currently overwhelmed by orders.

Three Cheers for Daylilies!

I like for my garden to be attractive to people and pollinators, so I always mix flowers and vegetables together as much as possible. I've learned a lot about my flower priorities over the last few years, mainly that I like perennials that are easy to grow, able to handle our extreme North Alabama weather, and colorful. I don't have the energy or talent for fussy flowers when I'm trying to keep the tomatoes alive and it's 100 degrees outside. Luckily I found daylilies, thanks largely to some friends who offered us all we could transplant from their yard. Daylilies are basically the perfect flower, as far as I'm concerned. They come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, they're almost impossible to kill, and they look wonderful in clusters around the kitchen garden.

If you're afraid to start growing flowers because you don't have a "green thumb" and have had bad luck with houseplants, then daylilies are there for you. You can buy very inexpensive ones at your local garden center for less than $5 each. Plant them this spring once they show up at your area's stores and watch them thrive. They spread over time, which means you'll eventually have a robust cluster you can divide after 3-4 years to add to other parts of your garden. Other than that, they won't ask much of you, just a sunny spot in the yard. They're drought tolerant but won't mind a rainy week, either, and they aren't picky about soil types. Just make sure they get enough sun; my only daylily failures last year were in too much shade. The plants survived but did not bloom well, and we've now moved them to a sunnier spot in the new garden.

As I mentioned, I started with a few truck loads of free daylilies from a friend, and if you can get free ones then go for it. They survived and bloomed even when transplanted in the heat of July, and they came back stronger the second year. Most of our freebies were the commonly seen orange blooms sometimes derided as "ditch lilies"; they're all over neighborhoods here in Huntsville through the summer months. I was delighted to have them but soon found out about the breathtaking diversity of daylily varieties and wanted more. (Warning! Daylilies are habit forming and addictive!)

We headed to the local Lowe's and found another popular daylily, the yellow rebloomer Stella d'Oro. This is a solid first daylily if you are buying yours at a chain garden center, where you should get them for under $5 per pot. You will find other varieties as the season progresses; Happy Returns and Purple d'Oro both turn up at stores in our area, as well as a few others. Independent nurseries and garden centers will offer a wider variety; our local favorite is Bennett Nurseries, which stocks a wonderful selection of daylilies and other plants throughout the growing season. Many of the nicer daylilies at independent stores will run about $10 each, but they're worth it because they'll grow and thrive and spread without much fuss, giving you years of color and enjoyment.

Oakes Daylily Festival in Tennessee

Once I had exhausted the options at all of my local, physical stores, I started looking at daylilies online. Behold - a world of glorious daylilies is just a keyboard and a credit card away! Specialty growers can offer hundreds of varieties tailored to meet your specific garden needs. You can get short ones, tall ones, spider blooms, rebloomers, giant blooms, tiny blooms, and all in every color imaginable. My favorite online daylily company is Oakes Daylilies based in Tennessee. They even have an annual daylily festival at their farm, which we attended in 2019. It was really amazing, and we came home with lots of new plants for our garden!

The daylilies have become such a passion for us that we made sure we brought the best of them with us when we moved in October. All of our Oakes daylilies were dug up and moved to the new garden, and I'm eagerly waiting to see them bloom. We've interplanted them with daffodils and tulips for a long season of color, but there's room for more daylilies. We left the freebies and most of the Lowe's purchases at the old house to bloom for new owners, and I hope they'll enjoy them. I already have my eye on some new daylilies for 2020 and some new places to put them!

Learn more about daylilies!
American Meadows
Burpee
Gardener's Path

Garden Wishlist for 2020: Tomatoes

Tomatoes! The one vegetable I absolutely have to grow every year is tomatoes. We eat tons of them! I prefer cherry and grape varieties because they're better suited to our needs and are more prolific, making it less nerve wracking to lose a few to the local wildlife. Last year I experimented with growing tomato plants from seeds that I bought at Baker Creek Seeds. The results were mixed. Heirloom varieties were pickier and more delicate than sturdy starts I bought at Lowe's, and some of the specialty tomatoes disappointed us in terms of flavor, but others were really tasty. I also got a huge thrill out of growing them and having so many different kinds. This year I'm still interested in growing from seed, but with less experimental space I want the tomatoes I grow to be tasty, disease resistant, and prolific. I'm considering some determinate varieties in addition to my usual indeterminate types so that I can expand the container garden effort on the patio to include more tomatoes there.

2019 Tomatoes

Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry

From Baker Creek Seeds -

Barry's Crazy Cherry (husband thought they were bland, but we had a lot of them, very prolific and small)

Russian Purple (critters got almost all of them and yield was low, but they were delicious, plum size, juicy)

Purple Bumblebee (yielded less and succumbed to problems faster but quite tasty)

Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry (Tasty and good yield - definitely the winner of the Baker Creek picks! They were larger than the usual cherry but excellent in a variety of dishes and salads.)


From Lowe's (Bonnie Plants brand)

Bonnie Plants cherry tomatoes

Husky Cherry Red (solid producer that grew well and survived better)

Sweet Million (early producer and grew as well as Husky Cherry Red)

Volunteers from the previous year also popped up in some surprising places around the yard (thanks, chipmunks!), and I transplanted several of these to the kitchen garden. None of them produced a lot, and they were an odd hybrid of the cherry types I grew in 2018, but we still got some bonus edible produce. I wasn't going to turn down free tomatoes!

In all I had about 14 tomato plants for 2019, which was probably way too many for three people. I gave away lots of tomatoes and froze several bags of them slow roasted with olive oil.



2020 Tomatoes

Of the Baker Creek seeds, I'm most likely to grow the Hartmann's Yellow Gooseberry again, especially since I still have plenty of seeds. Other Baker Creek varieties I'm considering include:

2019 got tomato crazy! Let's do that again!

Black Cherry
Isis Candy Cherry
Pink Bumblebee
Sunrise Bumblebee
Orange Hat
Micro Tom

Bonnie Plants are the most widely available brand where I live, so I'll also be looking at these indeterminate types for starter plants later in the spring, in addition to the two types I had last year and liked:

Black Cherry (the Bonnie version)
Braveheart Cherry
Candyland Cherry
Chocolate Sprinkles
Midnight Snack Cherry
Sakura Cherry
Sun Sugar
Tidy Treats
Yellow Pear

Because I'm planning to have more containers this year, I also want to consider these determinate types:

Taste the tomato rainbow.

Red Robin Cherry
Tumbling Tom Yellow
Tumbling Tom Red
Sweet n Neat Cherry
Yellow Canary

Obviously, I've got way more contenders than space, but not all of the Bonnie varieties are likely to show up at my local garden centers, so that will limit my choices a fair bit before I get there. My goal is to have 8-10 plants in all with a variety of types and colors.

Which tomatoes will win a spot in the 2020 kitchen garden? Stay tuned to find out!