10 veggies u can grow with out full sun!

something i found online today! great info here!

 

When most people picture a vegetable garden, they imagine a spot that bakes in the sun all day. For some vegetables, such as tomatoes, peppers, and squash, this is the ideal site. What if we want to grow vegetables, but don’t have a site like this “ideal” one available? There are plenty of vegetables that will grow well without full sun. Those of us who have shade can grow vegetables, too.

Basically, a good rule to remember is that if you grow a plant for the fruit or the root, it needs full sun. If you grow it for the leaves, stems, or buds, a little shade will be just fine.

Keep in mind that no vegetable will grow in full, dense shade. The following crops will produce with three to six hours of sun, or fairly constant dappled shade, per day.

1. Salad Greens, such as leaf lettuce, arugula, endive, and cress.
2. Broccoli
3. Cauliflower
4. Peas
5. Beets
6. Brussels Sprouts
7. Radishes
8. Swiss Chard
9. Leafy Greens, such as collards, mustard greens, spinach, and kale
10. Beans

In some ways, growing in a site with part shade is easier than growing in full sun. You won’t have to water as often, and crops that are quick to bolt in hot weather, such as lettuces and spinach, will grow quite a bit longer given some shade.

The best thing about knowing that these crops will successfully grow with some shade is that you’ll be able to get more produce from your garden. Even if you’re lucky enough to have an area with full sun that you can reserve for a vegetable garden, knowing which plants will take some shade will help you get the most out of your space. You can use that sunny space to grow the sun-lovers: peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, corn, and squashes. The other crops, those that do well in the shade, can be tucked in anywhere. Grow some beets or swiss chard in your part-sun perennial border. Grow some lettuce or radishes in a container or window box. Make use of the space you have, in both sun and shade, and you can easily double the amount of vegetables you would usually get.

Having a shady garden doesn’t mean you’re destined to live a life devoid of fresh garden vegetables. By making the most of what you have, you can harvest lettuces, peas, and other tasty veggies from spring through fall.

 

original website here

seeds!

its still possible to harvest seeds that we didnt take in yet in the early part of the rainy season which started for us around october this year.   i am still gathering seed of  blue vervain – the invisibility plant, st. johns’s wort, zi ciao, joe pye weed aka. gravel root,  all kinds of greens and salad, lobelia,  etc.

its as simple as stripping them off of the plant or dumping them out ,wrapping them in an envelope, and label them for the coming spring. some, however, require cleaning the seed from the chaff; the bits of organic matter left over from the seed pod or the flowering part of the plant.  its best to just isolate the seed so that when planting, you are just sowing seed, not little bits of plant matter as this will surely mold or rot or attract fungus which will kill off all spouts.

see here some st. john’s seed that i was able to just dump into my hand.   i have so much of this saved already that i didnt bother to collect this little handful.  rather i just chuck it around the garden to ensure a huge crop of st. john’s flowers.   it’s really a weed if not controlled….. they call it kalamath weed for it grows rampantly in the kalamath river valley of northern california.

 

it hasn’t become a big problem for us yet here… thank goodness…

st. john's seed pods

then you can just dump then out into your hand to save them. they must be dry... must do this on a clear day.

if you collect seed when its wet you must put them somewhere to dry or else they can rot or mold.  nothing’s worse than going back to your seed stash all wrapped up all nice, only to find that there was some moisture in there and they all molded.

 

ps- here is my favorite yellow sweater that my dear ma gave to me back in the day like 13 years ago!  it brightens up the gray winter like nothing else can!  thanks ma!

 

see here lots and lots of seeds of an ancient chinese medicine herb called zi-cao.  these look identical to job’s tears which is a big tropical grass, the seeds of which are often collected as beads or crafts.    these zi-cao seeds are like tiny versions of that.  so beautyful and abundant.  i will come out here with a cordless dust buster vacuum tomorrow and collect these with that.   it makes it super easy.   there are several thousand here.  enough to replant then sell, trade, gift, and share the remainder.  jai seeds!

dirt

the other day xenji and i cleaned up the fire wood area in the forested part of the farm.  in doing so, we were able to scrape up a lot of rich forest soil and leaves and duff from the area.   this we brought down and fed to some of our key garden beds.  we gave it mostly to perennial beds – the echinacea, valerian, balloon flowers and skullcap beds, etc.

this forest soil is so rich in nutrients, minerals, living microbes, mycelium, and countless other organic materials and benefits for the garden soil.  this brings a new boost of life into the garden beds which are otherwise just native clay soil, compost, cover crops, or anything else that we’ve added over the years.    the forest soil is a huge added bonus here.   ideally we would have enough to spread on every bed.  its a lot of work.  we did good with just 6 or 7 wheelbarrow loads.

see xenji posing so nice with our freshly cleaned firewood area. here is where we were able to scrape up lots of good forest dirt!

see this super rich soil here! amazing. so good for these beds. we could feel the plants responding as we applied it.

im getting very excited to see the perennials pop up this coming spring.  they are getting a lot of great attention this winter and will be super strong in the coming growing season!

moonlight

full moon over the house, taken from the garden by xenji.

fun and for life

here is some plant art with a deer skull that was processed with my main man jahmi jes karper.  the skull split open with a machete to obtain the brain for tanning its hide.  the plants used here are an oregeon native iris and a trailing penstemon.  ill post a pic again in the spring when this starts to bloom and grow.

 

blessed sweet love

dude, where is my country?

greetings and love to all nice folks!

wow it seems that this is it my dear friends!  i dont mean to mix politics with gardens here, and please forgive me, but at this point the two are painfully, and eternally married.

ok first of all- as you read make sure that you understand how to use this technology.  im just learning it myself as i figure out how to ‘blog’…    so  the yellow bits of text are links to other pages, videos, website, news stories, etc.  please open them in other tabs or other pages by “left clicking” them or ‘control/click’

this will allow you to look at them all in other tabs or windows while you still have this blog open…    thanks… now on to the real content:

it seems that our president has no love or hope for humanity and has deemed our beautyfulll nation a battleground.  this means that our very own garden and the pre-school therein may be raided by poor fellows with riot gear for no reason !! we could then all be held indefinitely with no word to or from our families.  this is not my opinion here but just the sad state of this piece of land that happens to lie within the governance of a corrupted system.

im so sorry dear ones, but at this point it is unavoidably obvious that we are in dangerous times and must stay together with steadfast determination if we are to survive.  again- i am so sorry to have to mix politics and gardens in this post as we are committed to bringing you only positive and uplifting messages from the soil…

however, if for no apparent reason, these peaceful blog updates seem to end and you never hear from me again…    just remember that theoretically it can happen to anyone now and may this serve as a symbolic and, hopefully never needed, goodbye just in case the worst were to come true.

ok to add to the relevance:  one of the reasons that your humble narrator may be walking around as a marked man henceforth, as is the one who taught me to garden – my dear ma, is due to senate bill s510 … this includes all backyard gardens nationwide..   sorry kids!  ask you parents why we had to stop growing tomatoes! 

again.. i am so sorry to deliver the bad news here but i am in tears here in the middle of the night after having read this fateful turn of affairs with the president’s decision and  thinking about my family and community being faced with the men in this video for being peaceful farmers.    is it really coming down to this?  and then with decreasing support in terms of guns and young men to hold them   do i need to fear for my life or invasion by china because im now classified as a terrarist for having 7 days of food stored up here in my closet?  moms i know youre reading… what do you think here?  i/we need guidance.

ok and to end it with something totally uplifting and fresh please have faith when you watch this vid of this baby buddha khaliyl…!!

sunrise mists which soften the dawn for the coming solstice… please tell me this is worth enduring for.

thanks for reading everyone…

blessed sweet love!