My friend asked me what to plant...

So I'm jabbering on the phone with my BFF who lives too far away to sit in her kitchen every day and drink coffee all afternoon, and she says, "I don't even know what I'm going to plant yet!"

She lives in a ground floor apartment with a small patio yard. She can have a small garden in the yard and could also have container gardens on the patio slab.

I suggested she use the price of vegetables in the store as a guide, then use what will grow here as a qualifier. Start with expensive things, like tomatoes and sweet bell peppers. Purchasing plants or starting them indoors from seed can shorten the growing time until they bear edible produce, so long season requirements aren't as much of a problem.

Of course, we try to grow favorites if they fit into the above criteria. Even if something isn't that expensive, it might just taste that much better fresh from our own garden rather than being shipped in on a truck underripe. I personally really enjoy yellow summer squash and patty pan squash, but some people can't seem to get rid of it fast enough. It's usually around $1.59 a pound most of the year here, so it's worth it to me to grow, but Sweetie fears it taking over the yard and having to eat it every night all summer long. Not to mention the neighbors avoiding us just so they don't have to figure out how to avoid accepting more squash...

I don't bother trying to grow things we won't eat enough of to bother with if I can't preserve it somehow. I also prefer to grow varieties that will produce enough at once to make at least a meal's worth or enough to freeze. Green beans come to mind. I prefer wax beans, and found a variety that is supposed to dump them on you all at once.

I love fresh carrots, but I have not found the right soil or prepared soil correctly to be able to get the carrots out once they have grown in. I think I have yanked more carrot tops out of the dirt and left more carrots in the ground than I have ever eaten from my garden. The ones I ate were delicious though, lumpy and odd shaped that they were.

Lettuce and spinach is a balancing act between warm enough to sprout, sunny enough to grow, moist enough to flourish and cool enough not to bolt. A good year is nirvana for the rabbit food lover, a bad year spells major frustration. I have become a fresh spinach fanatic, therefore I will attempt it once again.

Now I have to find someone with a proper tiller to break the sod on my garden plot. It's almost time...