Author Topic: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?  (Read 8021 times)

cbr shadow

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My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« on: May 22, 2013, 12:36:06 PM »
I have a roughly 10' x 10' garden space in my backyard.  In the last few years I've casually gardened and gotten some fun veggies/fruits, but I would like some suggestions on what gives the best yield.  I live near Chicago, so the summer gets a good amount of sunlight (but about 1/3 of the days sunlight is blocked by a big tree - poor garden placement, I guess).  I can water as much as needed and will put in the time.  I know lots of stuff will grow here, so I'm not looking for a list of what I can grow, but would like ideas for what give a huge yield and is useful.
I had (2) kale plants last year that gave me TONS of kale.. more than my wife and I would eat even.  I'm hoping to get kale and spinach plants this year, which would leave more than half the garden for other items.
Thanks
Ryan

Zaga

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2013, 12:40:19 PM »
A tomato plant or two, stake them tall and don't let them spread out.  I prefer the yellow heirloom plum or roma type tomatoes, but that's personal taste.

A zucchini plant, you'll get more than you can eat!

I'm trying sweet bell peppers again this year, haven't had luck in the past getting much fruit.

footenote

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2013, 12:49:12 PM »
If you cook, you'll get excellent value out of basil, parsley, oregano, whatever herbs you like. Toward the end of the season I harvest everything that's left and dry them for winter use.

Drying is easier than I thought it would be: harvest with plenty of stem length. Bundle stems of same herb with rubber band, twist-tie or wire. Put bundled stems upside-down in a brown paper bag, fastening the bundled end to the bag. Close the bag. (A stapler makes quick work of it.) Hang bags (bunches upside-down) in a dry location and in a month or two you'll have cheap dried herbs. Herbs are our biggest dollar-savings-per-plant.

Left

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2013, 12:52:49 PM »
green onions/tomatoes/strawberries are what I'm planning. I have about a 8'x8' garden, I'm expecting the strawberries to take up about half, and the other two do a 50/50 split between the remaining half

iamsoners

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2013, 01:01:03 PM »
Can't go wrong with chard--it is so resilient to midwest temperature fluctuations. Use new growth in salads and bigger leaves like spinach. You can do several plantings a season so they're maturing at different times. You can also cut off leaves and let them re-grow. Pull them when they bolt.

If you really get focused on higher yields, you might divide the bed down the middle and create a 2 foot walking/work space then treat the two beds like raised beds which allows you to plant things closer together.

hoodedfalcon

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #5 on: May 22, 2013, 01:08:10 PM »
Squash are fairly prolific, especially with enough sunlight. Potatoes can have a good yield, are easy to grow, and store pretty well. I love pesto (which can be expensive), so I plant a lot of basil and make pesto throughout the season, freezing it as I go. If you build a trellis, some vertical gardening will increase your yield.

Beyond your bed, have you considered incorporating perennial edibles into your landscaping? For example, blueberry plants are easy to care for, look good, and the blueberries freeze well. I don't know what your particular situation is, but I have a ton of perennials incorporated into my regular beds that are pretty and make food for me.

cbr shadow

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #6 on: May 22, 2013, 01:21:46 PM »
Wow lots of good ideas here.  I'll definitely try some of these.
I'm going to look into the blue berry bushes as well.  Great idea.  Don't birds eat away at the berries when they show up, or no?

hoodedfalcon

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #7 on: May 22, 2013, 01:29:03 PM »
Wow lots of good ideas here.  I'll definitely try some of these.
I'm going to look into the blue berry bushes as well.  Great idea.  Don't birds eat away at the berries when they show up, or no?

The birds get away with some of my berries, but I still manage to freeze enough to get me through the winter. You can always put netting over the plants right around the time the berries ripen. I don't know. You might have super-aggro midwestern birds though. Our southern birds are lazy.

adesertsky

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #8 on: May 22, 2013, 02:24:39 PM »
I also live in the Chicago area and I get crazy good yield from green bell peppers!  They are so expensive in the stores, too, so i think it is a great investment.  Also- regular old lettuce for my salads.

netskyblue

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #9 on: May 23, 2013, 07:56:09 AM »
IMO the most efficient food plants are the ones you can preserve in a manner that you will use throughout the year.  Do you can?  Or have a dehydrator?

Tomatoes can be canned, frozen, or dehydrated (sun-dried tomatoes!).  You can make them into juice, paste, sauce, or salsa, and can that.  The thing about tomatoes is they take up a good deal of space, generally prefer full sun, and you need rather a lot of them if you're cooking them down into something like sauce.


If you grow a ton of onions & garlic one year, you can mince and dehydrate them (then grind into powder if you wish), and you'll be set for a good while.  You probably won't need to grow those the following year.

Things like zucchini or yellow squash grow in abundance, but don't preserve particularly well.  If you grow those, you'll be eating squash all the time, for a very short period of time, or it will go to waste.

Sweet corn can be frozen, or canned, but I think frozen tastes better.  Strawberries can be frozen to use as a dessert topping or for baking, or you can cook them into jam, and can that.

You can grow beans and can those with tomato juice & chili spices for home canned chili beans, or make a "baked beans" type of sauce and can them in that.  Green beans can well, and freeze, too.  Same for peas.

You can freeze potatoes for hash browns, or can them.  Carrots can well, too.

Do you have the space to plant a fruit tree or two?  Apples grow well in the midwest, and you can make (and can, or freeze) homemade apple sauce.  If you want to get really creative, make some apple cider vinegar.

If you're far enough south to grow a peach tree, you can get a boatload of fruit to make jam or pie filling.

Lettuces don't preserve very well, so you're best off planting one or two every couple of weeks throughout the growing season, in an attempt to have one plant grown to cutting size about the time you finish consuming the last one you cut.

If you have the inclination to try fermenting as a preservation method, you can grow cabbage and make sauerkraut.

I think you can blanch & freeze broccoli, I'm not sure about cauliflower (I don't like either of these, so that's why I don't know much about them).

Chili peppers (ancho, serrano, guajillo, jalapeno) can be made into sauces/salsas, or dehydrated & ground to powder for use in cooking.

bogart

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #10 on: May 23, 2013, 09:12:04 AM »
Quote
Things like zucchini or yellow squash grow in abundance, but don't preserve particularly well.  If you grow those, you'll be eating squash all the time, for a very short period of time, or it will go to waste.

True on its face, but I'd bet they can be sliced and pickled (something I am only just starting to explore, had good results with beet green stems recently) or baked into bread and frozen.

Cantelopes and other melons are astoundingly prolific around here (US SE) and require almost no effort but do take up space (in the garden, and later, fridge) and don't keep well.

netskyblue

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #11 on: May 23, 2013, 09:19:54 AM »
Good point about pickling, I didn't think of that.  I was only thinking that it turns to mush when frozen, and falls apart when processed for as long as you'd need to in a pressure canner. 

I did make some cantaloupe/vanilla bean jam last season, which turned out OK, but I think I needed to use more pectin, or cook it longer/higher, it came out a little runny.  But it's just fine as a yogurt topping, which is my primary use for jam.

mustacheme

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #12 on: May 23, 2013, 11:14:35 AM »
I would recommend looking into square foot gardening and companion planting.
You can also time things. For example, I grow radishes around my zucchini plants in the spring. The radishes are ready to pull before the zucchini is large enough to cover them. You can grow cucumbers in a tomato trellis to save on the space they take. I also grow carrots between my tomato rows. I know people who plant beets in the shade of other plants as well.

Other ideas: peas on a trellis (anything can do, even string on some sturdy sticks); green onions, bush green beans, lettuce, spinach, kale, sweet million tomatoes, various pepper plants depending on your spice tolerance.

Jamesqf

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #13 on: May 23, 2013, 12:30:25 PM »
I'm going to look into the blue berry bushes as well

One caveat here is that blueberries need pretty acid soil.  I'd check into it pretty carefully before trying to grow them.

For a small garden especially, I would think less about sheer productivity than growing things you like that aren't readily availably in stores.  No point to growing 100 lbs of zucchini, if you'll only eat 2.  My big vegetable to grow is peas, since I love them fresh out of the pod, but it's almost impossible to find fresh ones in stores.

oldtoyota

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #14 on: May 24, 2013, 01:33:44 PM »
When you think of efficiency, please take calories into consideration. As I stood next to the garden, I was pleased with all of the lettuce, yet I wondered how that would ever really feed us. Thankfully, I came upon a book called How to Grow Vegetables that goes into great detail about calorie crops.

Calorie crops include potatoes and onions. Kale and lettuce are fine, but they won't fill you up. The author of the book I mentioned demonstrated how to calculate how much you need to plant of each kind of veggie in order to feed your family.

I'm not 100% there (to eating 100% from the garden) but we get more and more food every year. Right now, we won't have to purchase lettuce or greens from the grocery store for the next few months at least.

Sometimes, I buy a small plant. A lettuce plant for $2.99 pays for itself. A beet plant fr $2.99 might not. Potatoes seedlings definitely pay for themselves.

I like to use Seedsavers.org to buy seeds. They are non-GMO and organic.


oldtoyota

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #15 on: May 24, 2013, 01:35:22 PM »
You can put nets over the berries. You might to let them eat some though. They poop out the seed--and more berry bushes for all! The birds carried blackberries from a school yard into my yard. You should have seen when I showed my city dwelling friends my $20 in blackberries, which I got for free!

StarswirlTheMustached

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Re: My Midwest Garden - Most efficient plants for food?
« Reply #16 on: May 24, 2013, 10:22:04 PM »
When you think of efficiency, please take calories into consideration. As I stood next to the garden, I was pleased with all of the lettuce, yet I wondered how that would ever really feed us. Thankfully, I came upon a book called How to Grow Vegetables that goes into great detail about calorie crops.
Do you want caloric efficiency or cash efficiency, though? Potatoes are good for lots of calories on little land, but they're practically dirt cheap.

For cash, you want herbs, berries, and weird greens and other plants people in your area don't eat much of, such that they get sold at a premium. (around here, though, I'd skip on the berries--wild blueberries are the pride and joy of local foragers)

 

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