It’s easy to plant a garden. All you need is a few square feet of space and some decent soil. Even on a balcony you can use a planter box and buy soil at almost any store.
It’s already August, and residents of colder climes may be thinking that the first frost is only weeks away. But don’t despair: there are lots of plants that grow quickly and/or are hardy enough to survive a good frost. Here are some easy plants to grow, and it’s not to late to start them no matter where you live:
- Radishes: plant them today, and you’ll be eating radishes in your salad in a month. And don’t forget to add the leaves to a stir fry! Radishes are also frost-hardy, so you can plant them every two weeks into the fall so they’ll continue to be ready.
- Mustard greens: You’ll have early leaves in a month. And it’s frost-hardy, so you can continue to harvest leaves into the fall. Small, tender leaves spice up a salad. Use larger leaves in stir fry, or to make Indian dishes like sag paneer.
- Lettuce: Like mustard, you’ll have small, tender leaves in a few weeks, and it’s fairly frost-hardy so you’ll have greens at least until your first killing frost.
- Spinach: Very hardy and fast growing. I love it in salads!
- Kohlrabi: This unusual member of the cabbage family grows quickly and easily, and is very frost hardy. The leaves can be stir-fried, but the best part is the “bulb” at the base of the stem– slice it and eat it with dip, like jicama, add it to salad, or steam it with other vegetables.
When you grow your own vegetables, you know what chemicals were (and were not) used on the food you’re eating. And every serving of food that you grow yourself is food that doesn’t have to be trucked in from California or Mexico.
Perhaps most importantly, growing our own food puts us back in touch with the earth and where food actually comes from: Food comes out of the ground, not from a factory.
