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| Photo Credit: Gerald Burke |
| You can easily incorporate your vegetable beds into your regular garden, and your yard will still look great! |
Despite the fact Southern Californians live in farm-rich areas where much of the produce is grown for the country, food prices have gone up. Those high prices have hit every family hard – especially when costs for other necessities have skyrocketed, too. But there’s a surefire way to avoid rising food costs: Grow your own vegetables! It’s as simple as that.
You may be an experienced gardener who hasn’t felt the need to do it before, or maybe you’re new to gardening and never so much as planted a radish seed. But fear not – you can do it! Growing food isn’t rocket science. Nevertheless, here are some words of wisdom to help you along in your quest for less expensive food:
First, pick a spot for your vegetable garden. Plot out a 10-square-foot area in your yard (or the equivalent space in smaller beds) with plenty of winter sun, as well as a reasonable amount of summer shade. Work the soil up to a depth of 6 inches, mix in some organic fertilizer, smooth out the surface, and you’re ready to plant…which leads us to the second step: What can you plant?
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| Photo Credit: Gerald Burke |
| Lettuce can be grown almost all year long in Southern California. |
It’s important to know what you can grow and when. It’s getting toward the end of summer as I write this, which means it’s time to concentrate on fall vegetables. Happily, they’re among the most desirable for the home garden – and in some cases they’re the easiest and most rewarding.
Think lettuce. We use it all the time in salads and sandwiches. And leaf lettuce, quick to grow and ready for harvest early, may be one of the easiest. For fall planting, Green Ice lettuce is one of the best – ready to cut in just 30-45 days. And you can harvest the crisp, savoyed leaves for two to three months. A repeated planting will prolong your enjoyment of this tasty vegetable throughout the winter. Buttercrunch, a butterhead type, makes good leaves, too, and Salad Bowl and Red Salad Bowl are terrific as well. Plant your lettuce in a row, or broadcast the seed over a small area. You don’t need to thin the plants – harvesting will do that for you. Just be sure to plant in full sun, cover lightly with soil, water twice a day to get good germination, and watch out for snails and birds – both like salads as much as we do. (Covering the area with cheesecloth helps to protect emerging seedlings.)
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