Tip #1 – Choose High Yield Types of Crops.

Sometimes it’s not how much you grow, but what you grow. I grow one or two cherry tomato plants in my kitchen garden. That’s plenty for both us and the squirrels. Even the squirrels seem to develop “cherry tomato” overload. With just two people in my household, we have more than we need. Smaller tomatoes, such as the cherry type, are hyper productive. The smaller the tomato, the more the plant tends to produce.

I also choose long, thin Asian eggplants over the the large, round globe varieties. In the past my larger globe eggplants may have two to three eggplants on the plant, while the long thin Asian varieties would have ten!

The same thing happens with sweet peppers. There maybe four or five big sweet bell peppers on a plant but around twenty thin banana-type peppers on a plant. Thin banana type peppers are much more productive than large bell varieties.

Instead of the usual English garden peas, I grow snow peas and sugar snap peas. And the snow pea and sugar snap pea vines are loaded with peas. If you have ever grown English Garden Peas (the ones that are usually canned in the U.S.), you know it takes many vines to produce a good yield. Snow peas were breed by Asian gardeners to be super high-yielding. Sugar snaps are a cross between English Garden peas and snow peas, and are high yielding like snow peas.

That’s just four of the variety choices I have learned to make.

Tip #2 – Succession Planting, “Always Be Planting Something”

Plant in each and every month of the growing season. Sow seeds every couple of weeks. Perhaps it’s just twelve lettuces or another crop of bush beans. But if you continually sow seeds, you always have crops maturing and producing. You can direct sow the seeds into the soil or grow transplants to pop into an empty spot after harvesting a crop.

Tip #3 – Plant Quick-Maturing Varieties

I look for crops that mature quickly. And by quickly I mean 25 – 65 days. There are many varieties which produce a harvest and don’t stay in the garden for a long time. This frees up space for another crop to be seeded or transplanted. Look for short season or quick maturing variety. Here is a sample.

• arugula (45 days)
• heat-resistant leaf lettuce (45-60 days)
• green onions from sets (30-40 days)
• radishes (20-25 days)
• spinach (45-50 days)
• Swiss chard (55-60 days)
• bush beans (45-60 days)
• cherry tomatoes (55-75 days)

Getting Ready to Grow

These are a few ideas as you choose your vegetable varieties for the upcoming growing season. It will be here sooner than you think. February 2nd is the natural beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. Look for my guide to growing a High-Yield, Small Space Kitchen Garden toward to end of February. I’ll have it for sale on my new online store hosted by Payhip. You can see my beautiful new online store here.

There are pink blossoms and orange rose hips in my garden. It is the beginning of the second week in December and the English rose in my garden is blooming still. At the end of November, the buds were closed and I clipped, what I thought, were the last of its deep pink blossoms.

But a week before the Thanksgiving holidays the lovely Mary Rose bloomed again in shades of deep and pale pinks on each blossom and petal. I can’t help but sing the praises of the favorite flower in my garden. ‘Mary Rose’ is a David Austin English Rose that first appeared on the world stage in 1983.

She is an old rose hybrid and the first rose I ever bought back in 1989 for my then beginning garden. Mary Rose is named for the flagship of the navy of English King Henry VIII, which sunk during the king’s reign.

Mary Rose is strongly scented with old rose aroma with hints of honey and almond. Mary Rose blossoms with pure pink flowers in spring and repeat flowers we’ll into November and now December in my Philadelphia garden. As I drive around my neighborhood I see other roses are blooming, too.

Mary Rose is prone to black spot in late July and August when the Delaware Valley is at its’ most humid. But after dropping the affected leaves, Mary Rose blooms on and on.

Another stand-out feature of the Mary Rose are her hips. Not the humankind of hips but we call the fruit of a rose, a hip. Rose hips form after a flower fades. Rose fruits form after the blossoms is fertilized and matures into a fruit. If you have ever looked underneath the petals of a rose, you see the bulb-like green part from which the petals spread out of forming the blossom.

Rose Hips Mature in Autumn 

One spring bloom cycle produces rose hips that mature in autumn. The display of rose hips lasts through fall into winter. Hips need cold weather to mature.

Within the green bulb (called the calyx tube), the pollinated ovary swells producing fertile seeds. All roses develop hips. These fruits are often red or orange. They can be small as a .blueberry or large as a Bing cherry.

Rose hips are so distinctive in appearance that experts can identify a rose by looking at just the hips. Rose shrubs produce massive clusters of rose hips that come in various shapes, sizes, colors, and prickliness according to each species or variety. Hips can  be pear, oval, or urn-shaped. The berrylike hips contain the seeds. The seeds are surrounded by hard or pulpy filling. 

Rose Species With The Largest Rose Hips

The largest and showiest hips are on old garden or shrub rose varieties. These include:  

• ‘Dortmund’
• ‘Kathleen’
• ‘Frau Dagmar Hartopp’
• Altissimo’
• Rosa rugosa rubra

Rose hips are like Apples

The ‘Mary Rose’ has bright orange rose hips which are large and shaped like incandescent light bulbs. Rose hips remind me of apples. And botanists place apples and roses int the same family.

Roses are Wild

Wild or uncultivated roses occur around the planet, but only in the northern hemisphere. Roses occur in the northern hemisphere continents of North American and the European, Asian and Middle Eastern regions of Eurasia. As far as I know, there isn’t any evidence that wild roses naturally occur in the Earth’s southern hemisphere.  All wild roses except for a few species have single flowers with five petals.

Years ago I tried growing the local native rose, Rosa virginiana in my garden but the plant needs more room than I could give her. Instead of growing upright and shrubby as expected of its species, it insisted trailing along the ground and invading the growing spaces of nearby pants. The plant was a gift from a botanist so I am sure it was Rosa virginiana, at least he said it was.

Roses and Native North America

Roses are plants with long histories with the indigenous people in the Eastern forests of North America. Captain John Smith of Jamestown, Virginia fame, wrote that the indigenous people of the James River Valley planted wild roses to beautify their villages. I can imagine some of my grandmothers doing that, planting native roses outside their houses. I can imagine some of my grandfathers planting roses to win favor with my grandmothers. I think loving roses is in my DNA.

Some of the native species of roses are Virginia Rose (Rosa virginiana),  Dwarf Prairie Rose (Rosa arkansana), Swamp Rose (Rosa palustris), Carolina and Pasture Rose (Rosa carolinia) and several others.

Using Rose Hips

Rose hips contain as much as one hundred times the vitamin C as citrus fruits. If you would like to experiment making rose hips teas, jellies and other foods remember these tips.

• Gather the rose hips in fall after the first. Cold weather reduces the fruit’s astringency.
• Do not use hips, petals, or any plant parts from plants sprayed with pesticides, chemicals, or other substances that maybe harmful to human health. Don’t give the food to animals ever.
• During the blossoming season do not cut or deadhead (remove) the blossoms because you will be removing the future rose hips. Or at least don’t remove the last of the blooms when the rose plant winds down it’s blooming phase.
• Preparing rose hips: Cut the shriveled blossom ends form the hips. Wash the hips well and cut the hip in half lengthwise. This will allow you to remove the seeds easier. The seeds can be planted as an experiment in propagation or growing roses. Keep the hips chilled to preserve the vitamin C. Don’t use aluminum or copper pots, bowls, utensils, etc. when preparing rose hips because these metals react chemically with the ascorbic acid and reduce the Vitamin C. For culinary uses any very fragrant pink or red rose will do. It takes about forty medium-sized rose hips to fill two cups (measuring cups).

Useful Plants in Your Garden

Roses are beautiful and useful. Growing and using roses is always a way of growing food  when growing food is forbidden. Such as vegetable garden forbidding HOA’s regulations or other unfortunate situations. 

I hope this post is useful. Perhaps you look at roses in a different light. Or if you plant a rose, native or cultivated, you’ll choose a variety know for having great hips. 

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