Some Background

What This Site Is About

Its philosophy, if that is not too pompous a term, you can and should read on the Apologia page: it is linked at the bottom of this introductory page (though we do present some of it here).

The Basics

What it’s about depends to some extent on your focus. In the narrow focus, if you are a home vegetable grower living in eastern Washington and northeast Oregon, this is a large amount of very specific information on gardening in your—and our—area: what cultivars of each vegetable, herb, and fruit are likely to do best here, and how best to grow them.

But, in a wider focus, the information here should be applicable, and thus of interest and use, to home gardeners in a very much larger region—or, more properly, set of regions. That’s because our conditions here are probably not so very different from those of much of North America. Later on, we will go into great detail about what those conditions are, but broadly speaking this is a region with four distinct seasons and no really gross extremes of summer high or winter low temperatures.

Our USDA “Zone” is nominally 6b; but it is important to avoid worshipping at the altar of “Zone”, because a Zone number does not tell anyone much of anything about a place save regional coldest winter temperature; places with the same USDA Zone number can have seriously different mini-climates. Moreover, every actual garden spot will have its own “micro-climate”, affected by very local factors—the slope of the land, shading, proximity to a body of water, and much more—that will cause it to vary in one direction or another, sometimes by a lot, from its nominal Zone rating.

Our micro-climate is, we think, pretty representative—as to temperatures, anyway, even if not necessarily rainfall—of a great many places in the United States. We imagine that the information on this site is useful, with only minor common-sense modification, to anyone living from Zone 5 to Zone 8 (new-map Zones), inclusive, and that sure takes in a lot of territory.

In truth, we are colder than the standard Zone maps show, because our exact situation is in a “frost pocket”—a slight depression in the general land level such that cold air tends to accumulate in it; in any event, we get lots of cold snaps even in late spring and early fall, and so have a really abbreviated growing season. Thus, what will grow well here should grow well almost anywhere in the U.S. outside (perhaps) of the deep south or the frozen far north, and maybe even in those places.

We want to make clear from the outset that we are not and do not claim to be highly experienced “master gardeners”—anything but. Indeed, we’re a sort of litmus test: if we can grow it, anyone can. So why did we build this site, and why should you pay attention to anything on it? Because it only passingly represents our own “wisdom” about gardening. It is, rather, a mass of information culled, with immense—and we do not use the word lightly— amounts of time and labor, from a wide pool of sources, mainly but by no means exclusively the internet. But it is not a simple paste-up of everything we could find. If this site has any value—and we hope and think that it does—it will be because of selectivity in assigning credibility weight to the many, many sources we consulted, who often disagree, sometimes sharply, on many matters, and because of a consequent smooth blending of all those sources’ information into one pool.

Anybody can type an entry into a search engine and be deluged with “information”. But, as the computer world says, GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The degree to which a gardener ought to believe this or that source depends on many things, notably the source’s credentials, the extent to which her or his or their pronouncements do or do not comport with what other “experts” say, and the likelihood that that source has a bias of some sort. We have tried to sift, weigh, and cull, and present here the results of that lengthy, tedious (and on-going) process.

Such a task, rightly undertaken, is never-ending: As Hippocrates famously observed, “Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult” (which is often compressed into the Latin Ars longa, vita brevis). But we feel we have achieved enough to justify this site’s existence. It’s up to you to decide for yourself if that is so.

Why This Site Came to Be

We moved to our present locale in the depths of the winter of 1997-1998. We had vegetable gardened before, but in an utterly different climate, so very little of our experience of vegetable varieties, or even of certain basic gardening techniques, was transferable.

We did not start a new vegetable garden directly after moving because we were then living in what we considered “temporary” quarters while looking for a piece of land to buy on which to build our dream (and, we hope, final) home. “Temporary” turned into two years, but in April of 2000 we finally moved in to that new home. Since we built from scratch on open land, there was nothing in place for gardening. With our just moving in so late in the gardening season, and with much else to do, we got virtually nothing useful done toward a garden in 2000.

But as we began working on plans for our new vegetable garden—which, our being vegetarians, would be very important to us—we discovered that the seeming wealth of information available on the internet and in gardening books has some major gaps. The first of those gaps is information specific to our location, which is the northwest “inter-mountain” area between the Rockies and the coastal Cascades, more particularly the Columbia River Basin; that location is in the Pacific Northwest, but virtually all references to “the Pacific Northwest” in a gardening context will turn out to apply exclusively to the coastal rim, which has a maritime climate strikingly different from that east of the Cascades.

The second lack we perceived is more general and of importance to every vegetable gardener. It is a lack of extensive, reliable information on the various varieties of each vegetable—their flavor differences, climate-related performance differences, and so on. Such minimal discussion as there was focussed solely on productivity—as if, say, all peas are exactly equal in merit, and only their productivity (or perhaps their disease resistance) mattered at all.

While a few particularly popular vegetables, notably tomatoes and corn, have a fair literature on their varieties, collecting that information still takes tedious scouring of the available sources; for most of the rest, information is thin indeed. That is not a casual opinion: we have spent many and many a weary online hour combing through thousands of search hits in reaching it. Consider, as just an example, broccoli: it is reported to be America’s most popular vegetable, yet where are discussions of which variety—of the many, many available—tastes best?

The home gardener famously has radically different concerns from the commercial grower. One fellow, who works in plant biology, recounted that he was told—even he said it might be folklore, but it’s what he heard—that experimental new onion cultivars once were “tested” by being thrown hard at a concrete wall: the ones that didn’t smash were selected for further testing and development. Home gardeners are looking for many things, which differ in importance from gardener to gardener, but which certainly always include good flavor in their crops. Yet reliable flavor evaluations are what is notably lacking from all vegetable discussions.

Unreliable evaluations abound—every single vegetable in every single seed catalogue is invariably the very best ever of that sort. Personal-experience reports (which is to say “personal taste”) are what scientists call “anecdotal”: one-off data. Many “expert” resources, from university home-gardening centers to magazines and newspapers, just recycle the same few long-outdated type lists (though a precious few universities really do keep up). So that mass of data is really just—in the raw form in which one finds it—useless noise: it requires extensive combing, sorting, and cross-comparing before it can begin to be useful, and there is little or no such cross-compared data out there. Attempts to remedy that lack were the seed from which this site has sprouted—but it has gone on to, we hope, much more.

Please, then, anything you read here that does not seem to comport with your own experience or knowledge—tell us! This site reflects what we are doing and planning to do, so both we and everyone who might read it will benefit from any emendations. (You can email us from this link, or direct from the top and the bottom of nearly every page on this site.)

Our Gardening Ideas

Some Preliminaries

We are vegetarians (but not vegans) and we really, really value taste in our vegetables. We are not “gourmet cooks” (whatever those are) but both of us cook and enjoy it, and we try to include both comfort food and elegant dishes in our diets.

We believe strongly in using open-pollinated seeds and saving seed. (Some day Real Soon Now, we’ll expand that remark onto a page of its own, because the matter seems to us important in a large societal sense as well as in the personal, individual gardener’s concerns.) The exceptions to the no-hybrids rule would be corn—some day we’ll trial some OP, but that’s down the line—and asparagus, which one plants once and virtually for ever; the exceptions to the seed-saving rule would be potatoes (for disease-related reasons), all brassicas (it being our understanding that saving brassica seed is, for the amateur, fraught with serious disease-related pitfalls and snares), and perhaps the squashes (owing to cross-pollination problems).

We also believe very strongly in the deep-bed gardening methods, especially as set forth by John Jeavons in his famous book with the memorable title How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine.

That book and John Seymour’s classic, The Self-Sufficient Gardener, overlap a little but complement each other quite nicely (the later editions of Seymour’s book also include and recommend deep-bed gardening methods). Reading Jeavons is like attending a seminar in California—charts, tables, worksheets galore, a “get with it” attitude, all enthusiasm and zip and energy; reading Englishman Seymour is like having a quiet, over-the-fence chat with a wise and friendly old gardener living up the road. Both books are of great value, both are good reading and good information: they’re just interestingly different styles. Of the many gardening books we have read or looked into (by no means, however, has our perusing been an exhaustive survey), those two clearly stand out.

(Another invaluable book for the vegetable gardener, in our opinion, is the 172-year-old (as of 2022), 620-page manual The The Vegetable Garden, compiled by the Vilmorin seed company of France (first published in an English translation in 1885: the original French publication was earlier yet, in 1850). Fortunately, it is available in a modern reprint—now out of print but readily available used—and is still extraordinarily useful for clear, accurate information, including discussions of most of the open-pollinated varieties available today.)

A detailed description of our climate is, we think, worth your reviewing; while what appears on this site, including plant recommendations, is based on our precise local conditions, it is doubtless generally applicable, as we said earlier, to a large fraction of the continental United States, and even much of Canada—but you can best decide its relevance to your circumstances only if you know exactly what our circumstances are, hence our recommendation that you read about our climate. (But, with the realization, from running many web sites, that a lot of people want to jump right into the heart of the site, we have put that detailed description on its own page.)

Even if you are skipping over—just for the moment, we hope—the detailed description of our climate, there are a few other things about our ideas on gardening that you should know as context for reading the rest of the site.

Crop Rotation

We believe that a four-year (and thus four-bed) crop-rotation scheme is absolutely vital for prudent long-term success: solanaceae (tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplant, and their kin); legumes (beans, peas, and therir kin); crucifers (broccoli, cabbages, Brussels sprouts, and their kin); and corn.

One reads over and over that a minimum four-year rotation is required to keep the soil “clean” of potato blight (and other solanaceae diseases)—and potatoes are grown heavily in this region. The same need for rotation applies with even greater force to crucifers and clubroot disease, so they too need, and fit into, the cycle. Plus there is a good logic to having any one bed get, in succession, legumes to “feed” the soil, then heavy-feeding corn to feast on that wonderful legume nitrogen bonus, then the solanaceae (which like to follow corn), and finally the crucifers.

(The drawback to that rotation scheme, if there is one, is that one needs to be growing roughly equal area-quantities of each of those four classes of vegetable, but for us that happens to work out satisfactorily.) Some day, we will expand this bed-rotation information into a fuller page of its own, but we have now covered the highlights.

The Growing Beds

Size and Nature

Another thing we believe firmly in is using raised, deep-dug (or “double-dug”) beds wherever possible. We need to have a care here: double-dug beds are not necessarily raised, nor are raised beds necessarily double-dug. We feel strongly that you need raised beds that have been double-dug.

Keep in mind that if you are deep-digging a raised bed, as we and Jeavons and Seymour recommend, you need to take care not to step on any of the already dug areas, or you will just re-compact them. Use a board resting on the walls of the bed to stand on while you dig and fork the soil. (Use a wide board, or, better, a square of plywood, so you don’t have to be doing a balancing act while you dig.)

The “standard” deep bed is 5 feet wide by 20 feet long, making a nice, easy-to-calculate-from hundred square feet. We don’t like it. That five-foot width requires, for our aging and not slim bodies (one of which is 5'1" crown to toe), altogether too much stretching. Moreover, we stayed awake in elementary school—and hence can do arithmetic fairly well—so there is no magical virtue in beds being an even hundred square feet. We prefer beds four feet wide, and of as great a length as possible without making walking around from one side to the other a trek (our own are 4' x 16').

While a deep-dug bed does not need to also be a raised bed, making it one saves a lot of kneeling and bending, and helps you to better control the soil in the bed. There is a seemingly endless parade of web pages explaining how to construct raised beds, but our observation is that most such pages seem aimed either at people with only very modest growing-area requirements or with an awful lot of money (or both). They recommend rather expensive materials, from mason-worked stone to artificial wood, and seeem to suggest that a 4' by 8' bed is tons of space. There are better methods.

Materials

If you have some space, possibly the least expensive, simplest, and most durable approach is piling up walls of concrete building blocks (aka “cinder blocks”). If you buy locally in some quantity, you can usually get a good price, even with delivery included. You just set a course of the blocks (which are a standard size, 8" x 8" x 16") into a rectangle whose interior dimensions are 32" or 40" or 48" wide (we recommend 48") and as long as you like (we suggest a minimum of 8' and maximum of 16'). You do not need to do any masonry work: just set them down in place (but be sure the ground is flat and that the block faces all meet clean and flat). Then put a second course in place above the first (staggering the joins in a running-bond pattern); two courses is a quite sufficient height. You will need some half-blocks (8" cubes) to make everything fit right, but those are readily available.

Think ahead: be sure to leave at least 4' (preferably exactly 4') between beds (in all directions) so you can get a wheelbarrow or garden cart through. Then, before actually setting blocks, dig or fork (depending on its hardness) the ground a bit so the surface on which you will pile your beds’ soil isn’t a hard floor for growing roots. Finally, it is wise to lay down a sheet of metal mesh, the mesh openings no larger than ¼", over the full area of each bed, lest tunneling varmints devour your precious crops from beneath. Make sure that the edges of the mesh are well secured under the blocks, because those critters can get through absolutely amazingly small spaces. You will want a 5' width roll if your beds are 4' wide interior dimension.

If your beds are fairly long, it is probably a good idea to get some 2' or 3' pieces of strong metal rod and hammer them into the ground through the openings in the blocks at the midpoints of the longer walls (and, if the beds are long, also at the quarter-way points) so that the soil does not, over time, bow the walls out. Obviously, you set the bars up against the inner wall of the opening. If you can cut some rebar to appropriate lengths, that is a satisfactory material (rebar is the metal rods used to strengthen poured concrete: any construction-materials supplier—probably the place you get your blocks—will carry it, and might well cut it up for you at little to no cost). You can see some very nice examples of cinder-block raised beds on the Off-Grid World web site.

Note well in planning that, owing to the thickness of the blocks, the beds themselves have to be 5'4"; wide to achieve 4' of actual soil width. Also, if you can stand the expense, you can buy cinder-block “capstones” (8" x 16" x 2”) to place atop the block walls, sealing the openings so no weeds grow up through the blocks and for esthetics as well. Or, if you feel indulgent, buy some fancier capstones for appearance’s sake. Or, best yet, use the opening to grow more veggies (see the photos at the previous link).

A note on other raised-bed materials: things from sheet metal to bricks to fancy masonry to feeding troughs to (of course) lumber (usually untreated cedar). Some suggest old used railroad ties: a terrible idea, as those things are pressure-treated with rather toxic stuffs, including arsenic, and are dangerous even just to touch.

We, at least, could find nothing suitable any less expensive than cinder blocks, but others may have come up with other clever solutions. (There are boards made of what amounts to plastic “wood”, but, as we said, those tend to the expensive.) Think especially about scrap materials that might work and be had cheaply: look into places that sell used construction materials.

Deer and Rodents

Deer are a real problem out here. If they are for you, too (and mind, you may not know it till you start growing deer food, which is how deer tend to regard all vegetables), you will need put a deer fence all round your garden. There are all sorts of “deer repellants” on the market (and some ideas for home-made), but almost every serious gardener will tell you that nothing really works but a fence, a high fence (deer routinely jump 5' and 6' fences with hardly a break in stride). Nor do “fences” of cheap plastic netting do much save collapse into a mess of tangles almost overnight. Bite the bullet and buy rolls of cattle fencing (8' width or use two courses of 4’) and some pressure-treated 4’x4' posts: set the posts in a deep hole filled with Quikrete or some such easy-to-do concrete and nail the fencing roll to the posts.

If you have the time and money, it wouldn‘ be a bad idea to further cover the zone from ground up to 2' with fine-mesh overlay, to help keep rodentia out. (Better yet, trench the fence line before setting the posts and bury the bottom 10" to 12" of a 24" mesh roll, because those buggers tunnel something fierce.)

All that can get rather, as they say in our parts, “spendy”. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend putting in some such fence; it is not cheap, but it’s not killer expensive either, and you only do it once. Better to do it soon than late: you’re going to anyway, if you have deer or like pests, so why lose one or more seasons’ produce before yielding to the inevitable?

Indoors Growing

Even with capacious freezers, there are a few things that we would doubtless all ideally like to have available fresh year round, notably tomatoes and salad greens—which do not freeze usefully—and many herbs. For tomatoes and herbs, and possibly other things, some sort of indoor growing area is necessary if we are to fulfill our craving for fresh.

Fortunate indeed are those with the space and money for a true greenhouse; if you are among them, you need no further guidance from us. For the rest of us, there are alternatives, many not terribly expensive or cumbersome. We won’t here try to detail how to make such an enclosed growing area, nor how to convert existing space—such as a south-facing garage end—into one. We will say, though, that all home gardeners who enjoy eating what they grow should really try to have some sort of protected area to raise, at the least, some herbs during the cold months.

At the worst, one can grow a few pots of the crucial herbs inside one’s house, though the average home’s air is rather dry, especially when heated for winter, and some herbs like a humid environment. Still, better a few leaves from a scraggly, struggling basil plant than supermarket dried basil.

(Our own indoor-growing circumstances are described on the page detailing our local climatatic conditions.)

Our Tastes

We will go into details later, under each vegetable type, but a few general comments may help clarify some points. We want to grow our own vegetables for a number of reasons, which we think virtually universal.

• First, we can thereby select those vegetable varieties that have the best taste, as opposed to those that have characteristics of interest to commercial growers but irrelevant to home gardeners, and which often sacrifice taste to obtain those commercially valued attributes (such as being hard as a rock so they transport well).

• Second, we can pick our vegetables when they are at the best size for eating quality, which is often rather smaller than they can grow to; commercial growers, on the other hand, want the largest size (and weight) achieveable to maximize profit per square foot, often resulting in woody or tasteless or watery or even bitter crops.

• Third, many vegetables lose flavor qualities literally within minutes of being picked; while commercial processing has flash-freezing, the chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and many commercially frozen foods end up having been at least partially thawed one or more times before we get them into our own freezers (you should only know what goes on at supermarket loading docks). Grow your own and you control the freezing process.

• Fourth, we most definitely do not fancy eating food grown with poisons on the plant or in its soil.

• Fifth, we like the idea of saving seed and thus being, at least psychologically, that much the more independent, plus being able over the years to select for races especially well suited to our environment and our tastes.

Many specific vegetables have been grown through history—and many varieties of others selected—almost entirely owing to their suitability for being held in long-term storage in one way or another: drying, pickling, salting, cellaring, and so on. Through almost all of history, that was a, perhaps the, prime requirement for foodstuffs: that they get you through the winter alive.

Today we have the home freezer. There are very few vegetables that cannot be successfully frozen. Of those, in almost every case the problem is not loss of nutrients or even of flavor per se but of texture: certainly no one wants a sandwich with slices of frozen-then-thawed tomato on it. But most of the vegetables that have texture problems from freezing can be cooked in one or another of the ways normal to them and the result quite successfully frozen (as with tomato sauce or eggplant parmigiana). About the only material exceptions to “freezeability” that occur to us right off are salad makings (even melons can be satisfactorily frozen).

That being so, and we believe that it is, the need for many traditional vegetables is—at least for us—materially reduced; we can select for eating quality without much regard for sheer keeping quality. As but one example, consider cabbage. Cabbage has its culinary uses (borscht jumps to mind, as does cole slaw), but—absent a need for vegetables that can be easily stored without a freezer—it becomes a lesser item, almost a novelty vegetable. That is true of many vegetables once quite extensively grown mainly or entirely just because they kept well through winter.

(We should emphasize here that we well understand that individual tastes vary immensely and that we do not suggest that what we are saying is some sort of ex cathedra pronunciamento; it is just how we feel about these matters of, literally, taste.)

Thus, we in our planning look to each vegetable purely for what sort of good things to cook and eat it inherently lends itself to; storage characteristics are irrelevant. When we say inherently lends itself, we mean that the vegetable has in and of itself a fine taste. Consider summer squash: how often don’t we see recipes explaining how this bland vegetable can become delicious by being stuffed with [fill in the blank], maybe topped off with some [this one too], then some grated cheese over it, run it under the broiler, and voila. Well yes, sure, but let’s be honest: kraft paper would taste good given that treatment. What does the squash—ding an sich—bring to the deal besides a shell to hold the goodies? Unless we have enough space, and time, to grow lots of every vegetable we can think of (the stamp-collectgor syndrome), we need to focus on those vegetables of inherent flavor quality.

What those veggies are is, of course, a matter of subjective taste. To us, major vegetables, the ones we want lots and lots and lots of, are those that are wonderful eaten in almost any imaginable way, and are even—or especially—great eaten very simply as and for themselves. As stated, we will explore that world under the individual vegetable headings below, but in short: we believe, along with Nero Wolfe and many others, that corn is the Queen Of Vegetables; shelled green peas are a close second; tomatoes, whether raw in a tomato salad or cooked into a sauce, are a mainstay of life; broccoli, grown to a reasonable (non-woody) size is a treat indeed; mixed-green salads are a gift; and whoever first called the potato “lowly” deserves to roast in Hell (on a potato spit?).

We also really love cooked dry beans—notably kidney, lima, and garbanzo, though they’re all great (our household slogan should be “We Love Legumes!”); but they are one of the few things one can get at retail that are perfectly sound (though it’s nice to get organically grown ones), so we have no space set aside for dry-bean production (but a fair bit for green and “shelly” beans).

That’s the short of it; the long of it is on the pages listed farther below. You can look and pick your next target, but the page Home Vegetable Gardening: an Apologia seems a natural choice.

If you find this site interesting or useful, please link to it on your site by cutting and pasting this HTML:
The <a href="https://growingtaste.com/"><b>Growing Taste</b></a> Vegetable-Gardening Site

—Site Directory—

Search this site, or the web

	Web growingtaste.com

• Background Information about the purposes and design of this site
  • Site Front Page
  • Introduction
    • Our Climate—
      • Our Location (USDA Zone Map)
      • Our Daily Weather: Table
      • Freezes & Frosts
      • Our Garden Design
  • An Apologia: why one should cultivate one's garden
  • Deep-Bed Gardening (forthcoming)
  • Container Gardening (forthcoming)
  • Vegetarian and Organic Considerations (forthcoming)
  
  
  
• Recommended Crops for a home garden, by variety
  • Vegetable Varieties
  • Herb and Spice Varieties
  • Fruit and Berry Varieties
  
  
  
• Gardening information and aids
  • Tools and Equipment
    • Garden Tools (forthcoming)
    • Seed-Starting (forthcoming)
    • Colored Plastic Mulches
  • A Garden Calendar
  • Estimated Seed Life in Storage
  
  
  
• Miscellaneous Information of interest to the home gardener
  • Links:
    • Vegetable-Gardening Links
    • On-Line Vegetable Seed & Plant Sellers
  • About Oxalic Acid in Vegetables [now at a site of its own: Oxalic-Acid Information]
  • About Induction Cooking [now at a site of its own: The Induction Site]
  • So Who Are We?
  
  
  

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