Purple carrots and a Yokohama honeydew
It’s that special time of year. I turned on my television and there was college basketball everywhere. I noticed Wright State was playing somebody, and I realized I had not watched a Wright State game all year. That record still stands because my attention turned to what makes this time of year special – the first tomato seeds sprouted in my greenhouse in less than a week! It’s imagination time for gardeners. Wright State will have to stand on its own.
There is a predictable pattern to what gardeners do when spring has sprung. We pull weeds out of garden beds, scrounge for fresh compost, plant seeds in flats, and dream about what to do with all the extra produce. This is also an opportunity to spice up the pattern by giving new things a try. For example…
Have you ever grown moringa trees? Me neither, so it’s about time I give them a try. The seeds are about the size of a healthy snow pea but more exotic. Literature indicates our area is on the very northern edge of whether moringa would survive a winter, but they can be grown as annuals. Although tropical moringa trees can get huge, there’s a dwarf variety that reaches only three feet, and grown in a container and brought indoors in front of a sunny window in winter, it has a chance to be a perennial.
A gardener would grow it for its leaves which are loaded with minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants, plus it has a high protein content. And it’s exotic.
Same for goji berries. I started a few seeds in December and got two plants that are doing well. A second planting a month later produced four plants, so I have begun a goji berry plantation. Why, you ask? First of all, I haven’t grown everything yet, so everything in its time. Second, they are medicinal and historical. The stories they can tell, and I intend to listen.
Speaking of listening, I was transplanting some store-bought horribly root-bound colorful flowers, and after a while I noticed the conversation was totally-one-sided. I was chattering away in my head but not listening. One of the petunias needed a dark hat and more water, but I was simply not paying attention. I finally responded, and the next morning that petunia was singing better than Helen Reddy. Plants appreciate it when we pay attention.
What about lovage, horseradish and Jerusalem artichokes? Also, how many flowers can fit into your garden plan? The point is to make your garden an adventure.
I know folks who love a good tomato as long as it is red and round. “Why is it orange?!?” they sneer in fear as though there is a hippie plot afoot to force them to read a book. Tomatoes are showoffs. Their possibilities should not be denied. I personally embrace yellow, green, purple, multi-colored, long, small, large tomatoes, and I’m not the only one. Have you ever tried Banana Legs tomatoes?
The same for peppers, sweet and otherwise. An eye-catching productive variety is Murasaki, a slender sweet pepper that starts out purple but turns red as it gets sweeter. Seed-saver folks know that open-pollinated peppers might cross-pollinate and produce new varieties. I had a large red hot pepper apparently cross with a yellow cayenne because the next generation was an orange hot pepper I call Golden Cross. Its seeds produced similar fruit the next season, and I wonder what I’ll get from the next generation.
If you can grow green bell peppers, you can grow other colors, so a gardener can choose to take on the responsibility of stretching our collective imagination which will keep our attitudes lithe and limber. If I learn something, you get to learn it, too. There is no end to the important questions we’ll answer.
For example, where is Wright State anyway?