Full Video Transcript

Presenters: Cassey Anderson, Extension Specialist-Horticulture, Natural Resources, and Agriculture

Video link: https://youtu.be/tQm09tgDKXY

Descriptive audio version: https://youtu.be/hasl2T4DpJs

Alison O’Connor speaks:
We are absolutely thrilled to have Cassey here. Thanks for joining us today. And go ahead, Cassey.

Cassey Anderson speaks:
Alright, thanks so much. It was fun finding pretty pictures for this. That’s always kind of a nice thing to do. So I’ll start off with why change things up, but I love growing tomatoes because tomatoes are usually the heavy hitter of many people’s garden desires and I love growing tomatoes and I love growing new tomatoes, but I thought that this would be a nice way to bring some diversity into your yard and maybe you’ll find something that’s new that you really love to grow that you didn’t know about before. And I do want to put the caveat in. I know many of you might be familiar with a lot of the plants on this list. If you want to type in the chat or shoot in the q and a at some point, more unique vegetables that you think I should highlight in another talk, maybe I’ll try and do another version next year.

But for now, let’s take a look at the things I’m going to be talking about. It’s probably too many and I hope that I don’t run out of time, but I didn’t want to take anything on this list off of this list, so we’ll be talking in alphabetical order. I didn’t know how else to organize it about a whole bunch of different things all the way from amaranth to sweet potatoes and tomatillos. If you want to take a quick little screenshot of this so that you can kind of have an idea so you don’t have to be writing down all of them or you can write them down as we go through the talk, that’s totally fine, but as I said, some of these are going to be favorites of mine. Some of these are things I haven’t grown, but I know people who have and some of them might just be something you’ve never even heard of.

I was showing this to my director yesterday and there were about half of them that I had to explain what they all were. So maybe there’ll be some fun new surprises for you. Alright, so we’re going to start off with amaranth. Amaranth is it kind of crosses this lovely divide between ornamental and edible plant because you can grow it. It’s got these beautiful flower clusters that eventually turn into the seeds and so you can put it in your ornamental landscape and then if you choose to after the fact, you can harvest and get amaranth seed, which you can use to eat. Amaranth is a very fairly simple crop to grow. It does need to wait until the soils have warmed up and any chances of frost has passed. You can grow it with seed, but these guys are going to get big. They can get two to eight feet tall depending on variety.

I’ve seen some that definitely tower over me. They come in lots of different colors. I obviously picked a picture of one that’s very, very brilliant red, but they can be much more subdued. They kind of vary, but they do need that space in order to give you really good flower and really good production. So make sure that you’re giving them space. Make sure that you are giving them a little bit of nitrogen. If you’ve got good high organic material in your soil, you probably don’t need to supplement with a lot of additional nitrogen, but if you have lower organic material, if it’s a newer garden space, maybe fertilize a couple times over the growing season. And these ones, a lot of the plants that I talk about today are ones that are a little more tolerant of a few drier spells throughout the season without reducing yield significantly. So not to say that this you’re going to put in the garden and it’s going to grow all season in the front range of Colorado, which is where my experience is with no supplemental water. It will definitely need supplemental water, but it won’t necessarily need quite as much as some of our, particularly our more traditional leafy crops or very wet crops like a tomato or a cucumber.

I saw somebody just asked if they can grow, if they can start amaranth from seed and transplant it. Yes, you should be able to do that and then you can ensure that you’ve got better germination. I did not find anything while I was researching it that suggested that it would be impossible to transplant. I have seen these very successfully grown up at the research station in Fort Collins and like I said, they cross that wonderful divide. Once you want to think about harvest, you want to wait until we’ve had our first hard frost. You dry that seed and then you can use it. You can cook it up like a grain and use it in anything where you want whole grains in your life.

Okay, next up we’re going to talk about artichokes or cardoons. I know these are a little more traditional, but they don’t tend to show up in as many gardens partly because they do take up a ton of space. They can get two to three feet wide or even larger if you have them. In an ideal situation, I remember I was fortunate enough to go to Greece at one point and we saw them just growing in wild places. They love hot and dry spaces and so they really like our summers. You want to make sure that you plant right around the last frost date. They can deal with a teeny bit of light freeze, but no hard freezes. So if temperatures are getting below 28 degrees or so, it’s going to be too cold for transplanting these out.
You will want to either buy them as a seedling or start them inside even up to three months before the last frost date at the very latest, start them in early March in order to transplant, in order to get transplants that are big enough to bring in out into the garden once we’ve reached that last prostate for the best flavor for these guys, the more regularly you can water them and fertilizing at least once a month or so can really ensure that you get good rapid growth, good flavor. One thing that I didn’t know for a long time about artichokes is that they will, after you harvest that first flour, their drive to continue reproducing does not stop. So they will produce little offshoots and the very small little floret. You can cook and eat the whole thing much more easily than the big leafy mature size that we see at the grocery store.

Cardoons are going to be very similar in all of these other aspects, but for cardoons you’re not growing it for that flower head, you’re growing it for the stock itself. And so for the stock itself, it’s going to be a similar process to growing them and then you can harvest those stalks and usually you want to peel off the outer layer because they’re a little tough and eat that center part. It’s kind of a little closer in texture to the heart of the artichoke. You don’t get those leaves of the petals once you’re eating ’em. But yeah, once we’ve gotten mid to late season, it takes most of a growing season here in Colorado for artichokes in particular for the flowers to develop fully, you want to harvest when they’re full size. This one right here on the top, you can see that those outer petals are actually just starting to open. That’s a really nice time to harvest it. Once it opens more, the flavors are probably going to change enough that you’re not going to get as good of a sweet flavor profile. You do want to cut it with a sharp knife or I actually love to use pruners like a bypass pruner, cuts through that stem really, really nicely and try and retain some of the stem when you’re cutting it, get it in, get it cooled so that it keeps that flavor as long as possible.
We are right on the cusp for a lot of varieties of artichoke and cardoon for being a perennial plant, especially if we keep on our warming trend. This may be a plant that will be able to grow as a perennial in the future, and I do know some people who have a little bit more of a microclimate in their landscape and they’re able to mulch deeply, put a foot or so of leaves or straw or something over the artichoke itself and over winter it successfully season to season. So you don’t have to start that whole process over again. Or you can also dig the root, get as much as you can and bring it inside into a cool but dry space over the winter, which you can then transplant back out after we’ve gotten above that hard frost temperature of about 28 degrees.

Next one is our asparagus bean, also known as the yard long bean. These can get really, really long. They can grow up to three feet long, but usually for the best flavor you want to get them when they’re one to two feet long, they can get a little bit tough. Once they really, really get their full mature size, they’re a little bit more closely related to the cow pea. If you’ve ever grown those than to a traditional garden bean, you can find them in both bush and pole varieties. If you do choose a variety that is a pole variety, you need to make sure that you’re giving them good solid support so that they can continue growing through the season. The main difference between growing a bush variety and a pole variety of beans is that the bush varieties are more likely to throw one or two big crops in the season, whereas the pole varieties continually grow from the tips and so you’re going to get continual new flowers and new fruit production as long as you keep harvesting those existing fruits.

If you want to try the asparagus bean, you can plant some seeds directly in the ground once soil temperatures are over about 65 degrees. I’ve talked about soil about temperatures a little bit. If you haven’t tested your soil temperatures, it’s a really great way to know where your garden is at and to test your soil temperature most effectively. Use any kind of temperature thermometer that you have, preferably have it exclusively for your garden. Don’t try and test your temperature in the morning and cook your steak that night with the same thermometer, but about eight o’clock in the morning, go out, test the soil temperatures about six to eight inches underneath the soil and see where you’re at. That’s where the general rooting area of our plants are. So that’s really where we want to know that the soil temperatures are good. So once our soil temperatures are warm enough, like 65 degrees or larger or higher, you can plant these into the ground, put them just a little bit below the soil, water them in nicely.
They do take about 80 days to get to maturity so they’re not quite as sure as some bean varieties, but they’re well within the ability of much of Colorado that’s not high mountain area to grow well. They do not like it if temperatures get really cold. So if we have one of those weird little cool spells in August, it could set them back for a little while in their production because they are a bean, they don’t need a whole lot of nitrogen. If you have a little bit of organic material worked into your soil, it may be sufficient. You probably don’t need to do a lot of supplemental fertilization, but you do want to make sure that you’re staying consistent with watering to keep that growth consistent and keep those flavors nice and sweet once you start seeing beans produce harvest daily or at least every other day or so that keeps the plant producing and keeps those flavors really nice and consistent.

So next up we’ve got the cucamelon. If there was a competition for cutest plant in the vegetable garden, I think cucamelon would really be a very strong contender. They look like little miniature watermelons. You can pop them in your mouth. If you know kumquats, they’re kind of about the same size as a kumquat. They’re really are related to cucumbers. They’re a cucurbit and they are incredibly prolific producers. You might only need one or two plants for a family. Most people say that these never really come into the house. You end up snacking on them while you’re out in the garden doing your basic garden tasks. They do tolerate a little bit more cool temperature than some of our cucurbits, but they really prefer to grow in the heat of our growing season. If you want to start them as seeds, they take a little bit longer than our melons or squash or cucumbers.

You want to start your seeds about six weeks before the last frost. Ideally plant them up in a larger container so you can transplant them from that container directly to the ground. Like most cucurbits, they’re not a big fan of their roots being disturbed. They are a little bit more of a vine growing plant, so if you can grow them up onto a trellis, you can see here they’ve got those little tendrils that will grab on and grow up really nicely on a trellis or other type of support. These ones, they do need a fair amount of nitrogen and a rich soil is ideal. So either making sure that you have that four to five percent organic material in your soil or that you’re fertilizing regularly every two to four weeks, somewhere in there through the growing season is going to keep them remaining productive and prolific for you. Making sure they’re getting watered really well is also important. Anytime after you see that fruit start forming, you can harvest them. They are going to get more sour and the seeds will get a little bit more noticeable as they get larger. So if you like your fruit without dramatic amounts of seed, then maybe harvest them when they’re a little bit smaller. If you don’t mind the seed and you really like that tart burst of flavor in your mouth, you can wait a little bit longer or as they produce.

So I see somebody was asking if there’s an advantage of yard beans over green beans. There’s not. This is the whole point of this talk is just offering you some alternatives to things that you’ve traditionally grown. They’re both awesome choices for the garden. I like both of ’em and what they taste like. They’re kind of, the cucamelon taste is, they’re kind of tart and seedy. There’s a little bit of that cucumber taste. I wouldn’t say they taste like watermelons. The watermelon is solely appearance rather than taste. Okay, yes, for the cucamelons you can eat the entire thing. You can just pop it in your mouth and crunch it up, kind of like a lemon cucumber if you’ve ever grown those. Okay, next up, this guy kind of acts as double duty for our garden spaces. It often is sold in cover crop mixes because that root is really good at busting through hard pan layers, compacted layers in our vegetable gardens so you can plant it, you can get through any hard pan layers you may have and then you can harvest it, stirfry it up, and it’s amazing.

There is a variety called the watermelon radish, which has kind of a pinkish skin. So if you’re going for exotic looks with your garden, that could be a good option. You can direct sew it both in spring and fall. Many types actually are going to be a little bit better for fall largely because they like that hint of frost that comes and that’s going to give you a sweeter profile, a sweet, sweeter flavor profile, but we can plant them in the spring once the soil is able to be worked, usually planted around the same time as you’re planting your peas. So mid-March or so if you’re on top of everything in your vegetable garden, which I rarely am, my peas almost always grow a little bit late. If you want to try for a fall crop plant in mid-July to early August and make sure you’re planting for that fall harvest that you water really well to get that seed to establish, you can even soak the seed, and this applies for many, many vegetable seeds.

You can soak the seed for about 24 hours and a really saturated paper towel and I use a Tupperware container and soak the seed for about 24 hours that will kind of jumpstart that germination for you. They may need a little bit of extra fertilizer, but these don’t often need a lot of extra nutrients. They do like to have fairly regular water though, and the harvest can happen anytime between about 30 to 90 days depending on the crop that you’re growing. Some of them are relatively small, some of them are just behemoths. I’ve seen some daon radish that can get like 16 inches long and those ones are really going to bust through those firm layers that may have developed in your older garden that maybe you weren’t thinking about how you’re caring for your soil quite as much. This can kind of help break all of that up for you.

Let’s see. Somebody wanted to know if they start daikon seeds now, could they survive the freezes that we have? It might be a little early. We’re still only, I mean tonight I think we’re supposed to get down into the negatives. A lot of these crops are pretty good at dealing with light freezes and maybe if they’re covered a little bit, if you give them some protection then they can do 27 degrees, but when we’re getting into single digits, that’s too cold for most crops to be growing, so that is daikon radish. I think that’s definitely one that is underutilized and it is such a good addition to stir fries and other, sometimes you can even slice it really thinly and just eat it as a really crunchy addition to the top of a salad or something like that.

Okay, one more question on the daikon radish. Someone’s tried to plant them at the same time as regular radish. These guys I would think of more as a parsnip or a carrot than I would think of as a radish. Traditional radish seeds, they are such quick germinate, but this one I would really suggest trying that pre-soaking those seeds for about 24 hours before you put them into the ground or you can germinate them inside and plant them as well. Okay, next up, this guy I like more for an aesthetic unique addition to your vegetable garden mid-season. Sometimes it’s a little more challenging to find a really good way to use it, but this is a perennial onion. How these guys work is these little bulbils, which I learned are pronounced boh-bles, not boh-bules, which is how I’ve always said it. These little bulbils will dip down to the ground and they’ll plant themselves and they tolerate our winter temperatures and they will grow back year over year over year.

They do make really nice little pickled onions and the greens in the early spring are a really nice green onion, so it’s a nice way to have just some onion flavored crop all the time, but if you want to start a new one, you can definitely purchase them. If you know someone who has them, they will be happy to pop off a few of these little heads and you can break all of these apart, kind of like a garlic clove and plant each individual one. They don’t need a whole ton of nutrient. They can grow pretty well in fairly poor soil, but if you have a nice fertile, well drained soil that you water regularly, you’re going to get the best flavor for them, and I already kind of went over those new shoots, give you greens. The bulbils are great for any kind of pickling or you can chop them up and use them as an onion, although they are quite small, they’re really only about the size of somewhere between a dime and a quarter. They’re not very big.
Oops. Okay. Ooh, that’s a fun question. Walking onions provide a spooky vibe in a goth garden. Yeah, by all means, get those in there. They do have that green and the bulbs are kind of that red paper-y-ish color, so they might be a really nice addition. Alrighty, fava beans or broad beans. I was really surprised. My family’s from England and my granddad grew a huge garden every year in England, so I grew up thinking fava beans were universally known and I found out that once I started talking to other gardeners in the US that it’s not something that gets grown as often. These are a great option for our early spring gardens. They fix nitrogen and so they can help feed your soil and feed you. They do grow to be a larger plant. They can get up to three feet tall if they’re really, really happy with their situation. Usually one and a half to two feet is a little more typical, but you will need to provide some supports for them. You can direct sow them as soon as the soil can be worked in the spring. So those are going in with your daikon radish and with your peas, you can, if you really want to get a jumpstart, you can start them as a seedling and transplant them in mid to late March or so.

And if you want, you can also go for a fall harvest plant, these ones in mid-July as well. Nice big bean makes it so that they start growing really, they’ve got a lot of reserves in their [illegible] so they can get a good strong start to their season. They do not need, because they’re a legume, they don’t need a whole lot of nitrogen, so you don’t need to do a bunch of fertilizing for them, but you do need to make sure that you’re irrigating quite regularly. Make sure to harvest when the pods are nice and plump and green and they have a little bit of sheen to them. The pod themselves and it got cut off a little bit is right here in the bottom. The pod itself is not edible unless you harvest them really, really, really tiny, which I’ve never done, but you’re looking for pulling these beans out and you eat ’em. If the beans are fully mature, this outer layer might be a little tough. You might need to squeeze the lining out, but if you harvest them a little bit smaller, then you can eat the whole thing.

Windsor, yes, someone asked about varieties. Windsor is a great, very standard version. There’s not a whole lot of variety in fava bean currently, so you can give a variety of, you can do a little trial in your own garden, see which variety grows best in your microclimate. I do want to make the note fava bean, some people have a negative reaction to fava beans. It’s called favism, so if you’ve never eaten these, maybe eat one and make sure that you’re okay before you plant. Buy some at Natural Grocers or Whole Foods or something. Those are some of the few places I’ve seen them for sale. Try them out that way before you put a whole bunch into your vegetable garden, but if you haven’t tried it, fava beans are lovely. The flavor, they have kind of a green nutty flavor I would say.

They aren’t like a butter bean. They do not taste like most beans in my estimation. I think it’s a really lovely taste flavor. I like to eat them with a whole bunch of butter melted onto them as well. Can be a really nice way to go. All right, next up I’ve got fennel. So fennel can act as kind of a tender perennial in some areas in the us, but in Colorado we almost always have to grow as an annual. Some people grow fennel for the seed, some for the leaves and some for the bulb. If you’ve never had a soup with a fennel bulb sliced up into it, you are missing out because it is one of the best addition fennel bulb with a Parmesan crust rind makes some of the best soup, but now I’m diverging into telling you how to cook your food and we’re here to talk about vegetables, so if you do want to plant fennel, you can plant them as seedlings right after the first frost.

They do like to have their space. This is not a crop where you can crowd it in a little bit to try and increase your production. You’ll reduce your yield if you crowd them too much. You want to make sure that you have at least four to six inch spacing. You can go a little bit closer to four inches if you’re looking for seeds and flowers and pardon me, seeds and leaves. But if you really want that good bulb development, try and go up to that six inch spacing for fertility. For these guys, they do need a little bit more help once the bulbs have begun to develop, give them a nice shot of fertilizer as well as usually one when you have planted and make sure that you’re watering regularly so that you get really good growth and development. What is the trick to getting a big bulb?

Water? Water more than you think you should? They’re a thirsty little crop. You could also put some shade on them. They don’t always like the intense heat of Colorado summers, so if you get a little shade cloth on them, that could help get your bulb up. Also, make sure that you’re getting a variety that is going to give you a good bulb because the common fennel varieties are grown for the seed rather than the Florence fennel variety that’s grown for that bulb. So make sure you’re getting the right variety if you’re growing for that bulb and someone asked if fennel is allelopathic with other vegetables, not something I have heard of, but I can do a little bit of research if you want to shoot me an email after this, I’ll check into that. I have not heard that for fennel, but I wouldn’t, I can can’t say no with absolute honesty.

Okay, this guy is, I think one of the, well, I think so many of these are some of my favorites in the garden that people don’t do, but this is one of the sleepers that people don’t think of growing quite as often. This is a cool season plant. It is a relative of the broccoli and Brussels sprouts. So cool little fact if you’ve never heard it. Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, all of these brassica, they are the same species with just different gene expressions and so they’ve all been bred for a little bit a different part of the plant. So this one, obviously we’ve grown for the stem, whereas broccoli we grow for the flowers and Brussels sprouts we grow for those little lovely florets that we can roast up and be wonderful. Kohlrabi can kind of cross the divide between cool and warm season because it grows into the warm season, but you want to plant it in spring, probably beginning to mid-April or so, at least here along the front Range.

If you want to start them as seedlings, you want to make sure that you start those seedlings with about four to six weeks before you’re planning to plant them out. So you might be starting these ones in March or so to get them out by April. They are such, if you like the stems of broccoli, that’s kind of what these guys taste like and the leaves are really nice in stir fries as well. If you do plant them in terms of nutrition, you want to make sure you fertilize them when you plant. And then about three weeks later, after which point, you’ll probably be getting to the point where you have a harvestable product. Make sure that you don’t let these guys go too long. You want to see harvest them when the stem is about two to three inches in diameter. If they get much larger, larger than the, especially this outer part gets really woody and tough. It doesn’t mean you can’t eat it. It just means at that point you’re probably wanting to peel the outer layer off in order to successfully cook and eat the inner part of the plant.

I didn’t include a picture of it, but you can also, if you’re vying for that golf garden or unique colors in your garden, there are some really beautiful purple varieties of kohlrabi that you can find as well. Let’s see. Somebody was, oh, Tony’s answering bugs on the kohlrabi insects on all of our brassicas. Really exclusion is going to be one of your best bets if you can cover them with a row cover, seal it down really nicely around the edges, that’s going to be a good recourse. Alternately plant a trap crop, I find if aphids are your issue, Brussels sprouts are going to be your ultimate trap crop. They’re going to go for Brussels sprouts over all of the other brassica plants and so yeah, kohlrabi is a great one to include into your garden if you like the stems of broccoli or if you like to have those leaves to add into a stir fry.

All right, next up. I’m not sure if anybody is growing this, but I saw it up at the CSU ARDEC South research station a couple summers ago and I’ve been intrigued ever since. Legumes do actually grow quite well in our backyard gardens. They’re about as productive as a dry bean, so if you have only two or three garden beds, this might not be a crop to try, but if you’ve got a fair amount of space in vegetable garden, you love lentils, maybe throw in a bed of lentils and give them a shot. They are another legume, so they are going to fix nitrogen and once you’ve taken the harvested the plant, the roots will return some of that nitrogen to other plants. In future years, these ones are going to be one you’re going to direct sew just after the danger of frost has passed, you don’t need to wait quite as long as for traditional beans, they’re tolerant of a little bit cooler soils. Maybe you could plant into 50 degree soils instead of 65 degree soils, so you can get a little bit of a jumpstart on the season. If you’ve never grown any legumes like beans or peas, you might want to purchase some rhizobia. rhizobia are a bacteria that have a beneficial relationship with the roots of lentil plants and they will fix the nitrogen gas in our air into a bioavailable form for the plant itself and for future plants that have their roots in the same area.

Lentils are a longer season crop. It’s going to likely take all of the year to grow to maturity. This isn’t one that you can do two crops over the season, but they have lower water and nutrient needs than a lot of vegetable crops, but they do like to have a low or they do like to have well draining soil. So if your soil is very clay, very compacted and is holding onto a lot of moisture, maybe put these into a raised bed situation or make sure that you’re amending with some organic matter to improve the soil for the plants. Once you’ve gotten to the end of the season, you can prepare them for harvest by reducing how much water you give it and this signals to the plant that the season is wrapping up and they’re going to start putting their energy into maturing those seed pods. If frost is on the horizon, you can pull the plant and hang it upside down and let it dry. You’ll then crack those pods and remove the lentils. Make sure you dry them completely as with any dry bean before you store them for the winter season.

Okay, mache or corn salad. This one, I know a lot of people who love it. It’s not actually to my taste. I’ve grown it a couple times. I’ve actually grown it hydroponically a couple times and it does very well. It’s easy to germinate, it’s easy to grow. It has a very unique, almost like herbal taste that’s quite different from a very traditional sweet lettuce green, and so it’s just kind of a nice one to add in. If you want variety in your greens in the garden, they do grow, they germinate very rapidly, so you can plant in, you can succession sow these. What succession sowing is, is you can plant part of your row now in two weeks or three weeks, you plant another part of the row, two or three weeks, you plant another part of the row. That way you’re getting a continual harvest of nice, fresh bright greens, and if it is starting to get closer to peak heat of summer, you’re not as likely to get that bolting, which changes the flavor profile.

They can take a little while to germinate. So this is another one that’s a really good candidate for doing that. Pre-soak, pre germination with a wet paper towel 24 hours or so before you plan to plant them. They do grow, they mature very quickly, so as long as you’re fertilizing at planting or you have high organic material that four to five percent in your soil, you shouldn’t need to do a lot of supplemental fertilization for this guy and this one is very much like lettuce. You can cut and come again several times. So on this plant, it’s not quite to the point of being mature, but you can cut out those outer leaves, leave those smaller ones to grow out further, come back even in two days and do the same thing so you can kind of get that continual harvest in that way. Okay, Malabar spinach.

I’ve been touting this Malabar spinach for a long time. It’s a fun little one if you love spinach and get frustrated with the fact that we just don’t have a cool enough summer for you to grow spinach all season long. This is not a true spinach. It’s not related to spinach and it is actually a vine in this image. You can see how it is growing up on this trellis. So when you’re planning, if you’re planning to put malabar spinach in, you do need to have some kind of trellis or pole or something for the vine to grow up on this. Unlike spinach is a warm season plant, so you want to wait to plant it by seed until all danger of frost has passed. It can take about three weeks for the seeds to germinate. So you can do that pre germination with a wet paper towel or you can start your seeds four to six weeks before the last frost date and wait to transplant until soil temperatures are above around 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

You want to fertilize when you plant and then again every three to four weeks or so and water regularly. The more water it gets, the less likely it is to flower once, as with many plants, once this starts to put flowers out, the flavor profile of those leaves is going to change and they’re not going to be as sweet. You can harvest just by clipping off the leaves on the vine. The more you harvest them, the more you’re going to stimulate additional growth and you’ll get bushy extra leaves. So don’t completely denude your vine, but in this picture right here, you could clip off this large leaf and leave the little leaf to grow up and you’ll keep getting more and more and more leaves to harvest if you cut and come again kind of thing. Okay, okra. I know a fair number of people who grow okra.

It’s not one that I have grown myself, it’s not a flavor that I sometimes like that kind of slimier texture, but okra is one that I haven’t gotten, I haven’t acquired the taste for yet. I should give it more chances, but it is possible to grow here. It wants heat and sun and lots of both, so make sure you’re waiting to plant until soils have warm outside until soils have warmed at least 65 degrees. You can start it inside probably with your tomatoes or so, so end of march and then transplant out or you can direct sew. They do grow fairly quickly. It kind of depends how quickly you want your harvest to happen. So this one you can do either, it’s kind of like the cucurbits, melons and cucumbers. You can start it inside or you can direct sew. As a seed you do want to fertilize lightly with a nice balanced fertilizer.

When you plant once the plants are about six to eight inches tall or if you’re transplanting and then about three weeks later, again, making sure that your watering these regularly. They are not going to be a low water plant. It’s going to take around two months, a little over two months before you get to the point where you can harvest and you can harvest once the pods are about two to three inches long, usually it flowers and grows pods up the stem. So you can see these two are the oldest and it’s still got some buds of flowers that haven’t opened yet, so you’ll want to come back every few days and harvest store in the fridge until you have enough for a meal. Somebody’s asking how many malabar spinach plants you want for a home garden. I would plant probably at least two and just see where you’re at.

Oh, and planting the okra you want to direct sew as the risk of frost has passed and the soils are about 65 degrees, so this is when I’m giving you temperatures rather than exact dates because some years last year we hit 65 degrees in end of April and we didn’t even have a frost in May the year before. Our soil temperatures didn’t warm up to 65 degrees until mid-June, so it’s a lot easier to test your soil temperatures to know when to plant rather than relying on a calendar date. We can use the calendar date for an average to have a general idea of when we’re planting, but the year is going to dictate a little bit more when specific planting is. And yes, Malabar spinach does taste like spinach, that nice sweet taste. The flowers on an okra, they are going to last a day or two.

They’re not a super, super long lasting, but yes, they have a very pretty flower, so if you want to grow it as an ornamental, you can put a whole little row of them in. Okay, next up we’ve got a weed, purselane! Depending on your perspective, this can be a weed or it can be a food. There are cultivated varieties that are not our typical garden weed we have in Colorado, but you can also eat the typical garden weed that we have in Colorado. They are a warm season plant. They love full sun. They don’t need a whole lot of help to grow and germinate. If you have these in your vegetable garden, and you will well know that, it is a succulent plant, so these leaves are a little bit thick and fleshy, which means it does not need a whole lot of extra water.

It can be fairly drought tolerant and it’s one that you can give it a try. I definitely, my daughter loves snacking on purselane when we’re in the vegetable garden, it has a little bit of a tart flavor to it, so it’s a nice little addition and the nice thing about it, you can harvest it at any point if you want purselane microgreens, by all means put those seed out, harvest them when they’ve just come up to the true leaf stage, you got excellent little microgreens or you can wait until they get a little bit larger. The flavor isn’t always quite as nice once the flowers have developed or if they have seeds, so harvesting them earlier is going to be a little bit better. Yes, you can definitely eat the purselane that is growing on your property as long as you know what you’re putting on your landscape.

If you’re spraying with herbicides, make sure that you’re reading the label to see if it is a herbicide that is safe for consumption, safe for food crops. That would be the only caveat to purselane that’s already in your landscape. I have never bought the cultivated varieties of purselane. I just eat the weeds that are in my garden because they produce thousands of seeds per plant. Once you’ve got purselane you’ll probably always have purselane, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective of the garden of whether it’s useful as a food or if it is a weed in your space.

Okay, we’ve got another little leafy green here: Shiso. Shiso is a member of the mint family, but leaves are a little bit more savory in flavor rather than that bright, fresh mintiness. These plants are kind of cross that divide once again between edible and ornamental, so if you have a little front garden that you’re trying to plant and you want a unique green shiso can be a good choice. It does like to grow in the warm season. You can direct sow the seeds or transplant it as a seedling that you’ve started a few weeks prior. Once that risk of frost has passed, usually mid-May or so, it does need fairly regular water but is not super hungry. It doesn’t need a lot of extra fertilizer If you put some fertilizer down when you plant it and once about a month later or so that should be perfectly ample to keep that plant growing happily and healthy.
The water is really key to keeping a good flavor profile. As with many leafy greens, if you let it get into drought stress, it’s going to change the chemistry of all of the different compounds in the leaf and they’re going to taste not as good. You can harvest when it’s young and small and just have little greens that you add into a salad or something, or you can let them grow to their full size three to four inches or so, and that’s when you can use them more traditionally In Japan, they wrap foods in shiso and you can eat it as kind of a wrapper, and so if you haven’t grown shiso, it’s a fun one to grow. They have several different colors. If you’re looking for those novel colors, you can get the purples. It can be a really nice one.
How would shiso and okra perform in a flower garden? I think if you want to mix your veggies and your flowers, I think that’s a great way to go, especially if you don’t have a ton of space, you could definitely put them in. Make sure you’ve got good spacing with any crops that you’re trying to get production from. You want to make sure you have good space between it and its neighbor because competition can reduce your yield and reduce, make it a little bit more stressful for the plant. When I’m talking about fertilizer, you can use anything that makes your heart happiest. Plants don’t really care what they’re taking up as long as they’re getting nitrogen. You can go for the conventional blue miracle grow that you mix in on your hose end or you can go for organic fertilizers. Just make sure that you’re getting a good rate down.

So if you’re putting a synthetic fertilizer down, you don’t put very much. If you’re putting an organic meaning it’s organic in origin, fertilizer down, you might be putting a little bit more down than other ones. Someone’s asking about shisho if it gets bitter once it has begun to flower, the flavor profile does change a little bit, but the main way that the flavor is going to change is if it’s under drought stress. The first year I grew it, that was my mistake. I went on a camping trip in the summer and didn’t water while we were gone and came back and they did get quite bitter. So water is going to be a lot more key to success on that one.

Okay, next up we’ve got our sunchokes, also known as the Jerusalem artichokes. They look kind of like a nobby little potato, but they are related to sunflowers. You can manage these as a perennial. They’re not a true perennial in some ways, but they do, if you leave some roots in the ground, they will come back from that root in subsequent years. If you’re starting fresh though, if you’ve never had any sunchokes in your garden, you can plant in the spring Once your risk of, excuse me, once your risk of frost has passed, you want to plant one of these little tubers about two to three inches deep. If you want a patch, you’ll plant several of them throughout the area. You could let it naturalize over time, but you’re going to get much more production if you do it, if you place them several places.

Someone said sunchokes are prebiotics. Yes, they have a lot of inulin in them, which is a fiber that helps feed the microbes in our gut so that we can digest things better. They’re also super tasty. They have this bright crunchy crispness and you can put them on salads, eat them fresh, dip them into various dips. They’re a very nice little snack. They do like to have a fairly regular watering schedule, especially if it’s hot. Make sure that you’ve amended your soil before you plant them, especially if you’re planning to let them perennially year over year. You might want to have your bed prepared really nicely. They shouldn’t need a whole lot of additional nutrients, mostly focusing on that water. You can harvest in October until your ground freezes. These are going to get a little bit of a sweeter flavor profile once the ground has frozen, but you can harvest them before that too if you’re impatient and you want to try them and then leave some roots in the ground, which often is not hard to do because inevitably you miss some while you’re digging up so that you can have some that grow up for next season.

This is what, if you’re going to try one, this is super simple. It doesn’t need a whole lot of extra help. And on that very first page, I had a photo which didn’t make it onto here of the beautiful sunflowers that you get off of the plant as well. Alright, next up, we’re almost through and I’ll have just a couple minutes to do a rapid fire q and a if you guys want to. Next up is our sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are not related to, oh, excellent question. Somebody asked, how much space do sunchokes take? If you want to get a good little crop, you’re probably going to want to devote a three by six or three by eight bed to your sunchokes, fairly large space if you want a fair amount, if you just want to test them out, then just do a little space and you’ll get roots off of them that you can harvest.

Sweet potatoes are not related to true potatoes. These guys, unlike potatoes that like cooler, moist weather, these guys love heat and they love moisture. They like hot and wet. So we got the hot in the summer in Colorado, but we struggle a little bit more with the moisture. So making sure that these guys stay moist is important. They also do take up a fair amount of space, so making sure that they have room to grow and you give each individual plant room to produce new tubers is really important to successfully to have success. Growing sweet potatoes, you want to wait until soils have warmed up substantially plant in soils when they’re around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, but planting sweet potatoes is a little bit different from planting a traditional potato because you’re going to plant a slip and I should have put a picture of a slip in, but the slips are essentially the little sprouts, that come up when it’s been sitting in your kitchen, off of your sweet potato and it can take a long time for slips to develop off of a sweet potato.

Give them plenty of space when you’re planting them about 12 to 18 inches in between each plant. If you do have a clay soil, make sure you’re amending with organic material. They don’t like a compacted soil. They are going to need regular feeding at least two to three times over the season as well as a planting. Or you can mix in a slow release fertilizer when you plant so that you don’t really have to think about it for the remainder of the season. You can start your harvest when the tips of the vines and the leaves of these look just like the sweet potato vine that we put in our ornamental beds. So you can have, these could be an ornamental aspect in some part of your landscape. I didn’t think I’d be quite talking about all the pretty aspects of some of these plants, but there we are.

And with sweet potatoes, once you’ve harvested them, you do need to cure them in a warm and humid shady space for about 10 days for them to have really good longevity into the season. And the foliage is also edible. You don’t want to harvest tons of it, but you can even have little bits of it that you can add in as greens to your salads or to stir fries. Okay, and we’re onto our very last one, the tomatillo. This is probably one of the more common ones, but I love tomatillos and I can’t not include them. If you haven’t grown a tomatillo, I highly encourage it because they’re fun and they may stick around forever if you let them. They are an annual plant, but if you let one of these little fruits drop, they’re likely to reseed very readily into your garden.

You can plant them as transplants after the risk of frost is gone. Kind of similar to tomatoes, soils can be around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. You need at least two plants for ideal pollination. If you’re starting your seeds indoors, follow a tomato schedule. It’s about six weeks before the last frost date to get really good production, fertilize them lightly about four weeks and eight weeks after you’ve transplanted, water them deeply and infrequently. They can take some mild drought. I’ve had some that have popped up in the un-irrigated row of my vegetable garden, but I’ve never really irrigated them. They’re getting some from the beds surrounding them and they still produce fruit successfully that tastes good.

How tall is the plant? The plant gets two to three feet tall, and the nice thing about tomatillos is that they are fairly self-supporting, so you don’t need to futz around with tomato cages in the same way. They will continue to produce on the same plant throughout most of the season. For harvesting, you can harvest once that fruit has filled the husk, and if it’s begun to turn yellow, it means it’s over ripe. They get kind of this stickly sweet taste once they’re over ripe, don’t recommend eating them at that point. Try and get them when they’ve just filled the husk and then you can peel it off and use it in any way that you would a tomato or they make a really nice salsa too. If you have chosen one of these purple varieties. They will get to be purple when they’re ripe. If you’ve never eaten tomatillos. They have a nice tangy flavor that is not nearly as sweet as a tomato and the seeds are a little bit more distinct in your mouth. They kind of make me think of a chia seed. All right, we’ve got three whole minutes left.

How to keep the nasty worms off. I have never gotten worms on my tomatillo plant, so if you have some pictures, you could send me an email. I’ll throw my email into the chat as well so you can copy it. Alright, yeah, so that one I’m not sure. Do the tall amaranth have a sturdy stock or do they need staking or be against fence? They are fairly self-supporting. You shouldn’t, as long as they are growing, they’re not over fertilized and over watered, they should be able to support themselves. Thank you. I’m a beginner with a large backyard. How many plants should you grow?

So how many plans to grow is a tricky question because I think especially if you’re starting out in a vegetable garden, you want to grow at the rate at which you are able to keep care of it. So for your first year, trying to feed your family exclusively out of a garden I would say is not a realistic goal, but you have a small garden space, have supplemental things in your garden, and if you want to talk more, I’m happy to chat after this about ideas on how to plan your garden space. Butter beans can grow here. It’s not as common of a bean. I think they take a little bit longer than our season sometimes allows. Where to find local Colorado seeds for these varieties. There’s a couple different local seed companies that are really great, Botanical Interests. Oh, the other ones have just flown out of my brain. BBB Seeds, lake Valley are all some good more local companies, but there are lots of really good seed companies around. Which of these plants would work in a container or raised bed four by two. Any of these would work in a raised bed for containers. I wouldn’t do any of the root vegetables. I would stick more with the leafy greens. In particular, the shiso and the matche. There’s a lot. Oh yes. Masa in Boulder. That is also a local seed producer. Thank you for adding that in.

Yeah. Okay. All right. We are at one o’clock, so I’m going to try and respect everybody’s time. Thank you guys so much. If you do have more questions, definitely send those my way, my email is in the chat there (cmanderson@adcogov.org). Otherwise, thank you and have a great rest of your day.