Best Vegetables for your Home Garden

Knowing the best vegetables is often a matter of learning by doing, but there are just too many garden vegetables to choose from. Learning from others is the only practical way to know about good vegetable varieties without having to try them all.

Let's look at some great vegetables for your home garden. I have a long list of what I consider my favorite vegetables, and I want to share it with you. If you are into growing garden vegetables, then I hope you'll try some of my favorites.

In alphabetical order by general category, here they are:

Greens

Swiss Chard, an important plant for nearly any vegetable garden where an abundance of good nutrition is of interest. Swiss Chard provides a variety of colors and flavor, and offers the home vegetable gardener with near trouble-free cultivation. Here is a good look at a vegetable that is definitely one of the best vegetables you can grow.

A relatively tall leafy green, Swiss Chard grows in bunches. Part of the same family as beets, but having very little resemblance to beets, Swiss chard looks a lot like a small crinkled palm that grows about 12 to 18 inches high.

It tastes a bit like spinach, and you eat both stems and leaves. It can be used raw in salads, cooked with onions and garlic as hot greens served with vinegar, or used like lettuce in a sandwich.

Cut the stems into small pieces and cook them first since they require a little more time, then add the leaves. When the leaves cook down a bit, you're ready to serve.

This hardy plant comes in several colors -- white stem, red stem, and rainbow. Swiss Chard is easy to grow and tolerates a wide range of weather. It can be grown with great success in spring, summer and fall.

Given adequate protection, a 2 foot by 3 foot plot of chard can take you into early winter and provide an armload of greens every week to satisfy your need for fresh dark green leafy vegetables. It's abundant production makes it one of the best vegetables in my garden.

If you enjoy greens, Swiss Chard is bound to please. My favorite is the red stemmed Rhubarb Chard for a rich flavor and attractive plant. Fordhook Giant is a white stemmed chard that is an abundant producer, and is part of my garden every year.

The best part about Swiss Chard is that it will keep you fed as long as you keep it watered. It does its level best to keep you in rich dark greens over an extended season, and asks for very little attention in return. It's also an attractive plant that is a high volume producer, and that's why it sits at the top of my list of best vegetables for the home garden.

Lettuce

Romaine lettuce is one of the best vegetables I know of. It might very well earn your regard as one of your favorites once you learn more about it, and give it a try.

To start with, there is a wide variety of romaine type lettuces. There are different colors, sizes, leaf shape, texture, appearance and flavor. If you can't find one that suits your fancy, then you aren't looking very hard.

Let's take a peek at some of the romaine lettuce varieties that I consider among the best vegetables in the garden.

• Valmaine grows easily and provides an abundant crop. Cold hardy and tolerant of heat, this lettuce is great for sandwiches, salads, and munching straight from the stalk. It's light green in color and creates smooth, slightly ribbed 8 to 12 inch leaves that are broad, flat and sweet. It also blends well with other lettuces in a salad.

• Crisp Mint is an easy grower as well and has a nice mint green color. Its leaves are covered with dimple-like puckers that give it a distinctive appearance. The broad and flat leaves are 8 to 12 inches long, and the plants produce well. It has a pleasant sweet taste that blends well with other lettuces for salads.

• Little Gem is a rather compact plant with a slightly twisted and heavily ribbed appearance. It is a modest yet adequate producer of sweet well textured leaves. Expect the plant to provide leaves that are about 8 inches in length and excellent for a salad.

  Because of their twisted and ribbed nature, the leaves provide lots of hiding places for salad dressing. This variety has a nice medium green appearance and is sweet and delicious. Rather distinctive in appearance and texture, it is a good companion for the other flat leaf romaine lettuces like Crisp Mint and Valmaine.

All three of these romaine lettuce types are slow to bolt and stay sweet even with elevated growing temperatures, and that scores well on my list of characteristics for best vegetables.

If you harvest the outside leaves as the plant is developing, you'll be sure to have several months of harvest. This approach nearly eliminates the need to succession plant. You cut the outside leaves, and it regenerates new leaves on the main stalk.

As an alternative, romaine type lettuces can be harvested in a more traditional manner by taking the whole plant once it has formed a tightly grouped column of leaves. This whole plant approach will provide you with plenty of lettuce, but the harvest season will be measured in weeks, not months.

Romaine type lettuces are relatively cold hardy. They can be started indoors or outside, and can tolerate temperatures well below freezing if you provide some protection from the wind. Development is limited in cold weather, best in cool weather, and warmer conditions promote a growth and production sprint that will be challenging to keep up with.

If you grew only these three varieties in your home vegetable garden, you wouldn't be disappointed. They are some of the best vegetables because they are good producers in a wide range of temperatures, and they require no exceptional care.

Butterhead lettuce can also be a great addition to the table. Here is one you'll be sure to enjoy. It's called Pirat, and it's a German variety that has a sweet mild flavor and a beautiful appearance. You just can't help but marvel at the gently twisted leafs with their beautiful rose tints.

Harvesting a larger head lets you to enjoy the beauty of this multi-colored lettuce as it becomes mature. It also allows you to slice it down the middle and serve butterhead lettuce halves in a bowl with the cut side up, laced with a nice light Italian dressing.

Summer Squash

Butterstick Summer Squash may very well be one of the best vegetables in the summer squash category. You'll have a bountiful harvest of delicious yellow squash if you grow just a few plants of Butterstick, my favorite variety of summer squash.

A zucchini-like squash, Butterstick is a good variety to grow if you like yellow summer squash. They are handsome, prolific and delicious. All characteristics of best vegetables in my garden.

Let's take a close look at Butterstick summer squash to see how it might earn your regard as one of the best vegetables in your garden:

• It grows easily and eagerly. Like other squash varieties, Butterstick is easy to germinate and grows quickly. You'll find the plant is sporting blossoms just after it has a few mature leaves on it and measures only a foot across. In another week, it comes out quickly with nice yellow fruit.

• You get an abundant crop. Butterstick provides a bounty of squash, more than zucchini. It isn't uncommon to have 6 or more fruits forming at the same time. The photo below shows 12 fruits in development on one Butterstick plant.
  
• Butterstick fruit is similar in shape to a zucchini. Long and slender when young, and more chubby in appearance as it gets a bit older. It is good for slicing across to create "rounds", or slicing lengthwise to serve as "sticks". Let it get larger and cut in half lengthwise to use as a "boat" for you favorite ground meat stuffing.

• Delicious flavor. You'll find that Butterstick has a nice mild, yet rich flavor. It goes very well with cheese and creamy sauces. The first year we grew Butterstick, we ate it two meals a day during the growing season, and never tired of it.

  A regular green zucchini is bland by comparison. Any vegetable that you can eat two meal every day during the growing season has to be one of the best vegetables you can grow.

• Dries and freezes well. If you can't have it fresh, then you can dry or freeze it, and you'll still enjoy it's delicious flavor.

• Grow it to any size you want. Like any of the zucchini type squash, when about 6 inches in length, they are a gourmet treat. Our experience shows that Butterstick has small seeds even when the fruit is allowed to grow to a larger size. Seeds become an issue at 14 inches or more, but the flesh remains delicious and tender even if you allow the fruit to grow to the size of your forearm.

• Handsome and modest size bush. Butterstick grows on a handsome bush that sports deeply serrated and mottled leaves. The plant remains a modest size, so two can be easily grown in a 3 by 6 foot garden space.

So, there you have it. A beautiful modest sized plant that is easy to grow and produces an abundance of delicious fruit that serves up well anytime you wish to harvest. Extra fruit can be frozen or dried to bring back the delicious memories of summer in the middle of the winter. If you only grew Butterstick summer squash, you wouldn't want for any others.

Butterstick is clearly on my list of best vegetables, and now that you know about it, you'll probably have it on your best vegetables list as well.

Tomatoes

Although we refer to it as a vegetable, the tomato is technically a berry, and therefore a fruit. I don't let that fact bother me one bit when I tell you that small tomatoes are one of the best vegetables to grow in the home garden.

Super Sweet 100 is a true cherry tomato. It makes small red round tomatoes that are wonderfully sweet and flavorful, and have plenty of juice beneath their thin skin. They grow abundantly in large clusters that are similar to grapes.

Although it's an indeterminate plant, the Super Sweet 100 seems to enjoy a more compact habit of about 5 to 6 feet tall. A large tomato cage or tall stake should be sufficient to keep your Super Sweet 100 plants happy and easily accessible.

Juliette is another small red tomato variety that I enjoy. An indeterminate variety that enjoys growing only as high a you care to reach, the Juliette is an abundant producer of elongated fruit that resembles large grapes or immature prune plums.

Juliette have thicker skins than the Super Sweet 100 variety, and provide a nice tomato flavor that has a good balance between acidity and sweetness. You'll know when Juliettes are ready to pick as they will snap off the vine into your hand with just a little encouragement from you.

The firm flesh of the Juliette makes it a perfect tomato for slicing in half lengthwise for salads. Many of my Juliettes never make it into the house as I personally and immediately "can them" in the garden while doing chores. There just isn't a better snack than the bite size delicious Juliette tomato that grows in abundance.

Are you ready for a small green tomato that is one of the most unusual you'll ever grow? Okay then, let's take a look.

Green Sausage is an odd name, but most appropriate for this small green tomato. A determinate plant, the Green Sausage produces 2 to 4 inch elongated tomatoes that look quite like small light green wax peppers.

The tomatoes grow on a bushy plant that fits well in small and medium size tomato cages. When ripe, the fruits have mottled stripes of light green and yellow. The seeds are a medium green, just like an unripe tomato, and that makes for an interesting contrast with the outer flesh when sliced width-wise for a vegetable tray.

Not only are Green Sausage tomatoes odd looking, but they also have an unusual taste. In fact, they don't taste much like a tomato at all. The firm flesh of the Green Sausage has a pleasing texture and a mild fresh taste that makes them well suited for a snack tray or salad.

I like things that are different, and that's why Green Sausage makes my list of best vegetables.

Done with Best Vegetables, take me back to Growing Vegetables