What to grow, what to grow...

Deciding what vegetables to plant was a fairly easy process; determining what grows when was a little more of a challenge!

Most of the websites I perused said to be sure to wait until the last frost appears. Obviously, frost kills plants. Also, there are certain vegetables that are to be planted in early spring, when others should be saved for warmer weather. Well, Southern California weather has been pretty unpredictable this year. We’ve had much more rain than normal and the temperature seems to be a little schizophrenic. For example, this week started off cool (low to mid 60s) and cloudy, but by Thursday it’s supposed to be 87 degrees. So do you plant cool weather veggies or warm weather veggies?

How about…both?!

After talking with my parents, we determined to plant everything at once since there was no chance of any more frost. This is also advantageous because it allows us to plant more vegetables later in the summer if we so chose. I’m seriously dreaming of months and months of tomatoes!

So I met up with them for lunch to plan our attack. Tomatoes, green beans, summer squash, bell peppers, and herbs topped our list. These were things my dad had grown in the past, so we knew they were tried and true producers.

But I also wanted to get a little adventurous! This is quite unlike me, so there must have been some extra awesomeness in my Starbucks that morning.

Several years ago, my mother-in-law sent me a recipe for homemade pickles and I’ve made them for a few years. So delish! So, I decided to plant some pickling cucumbers. I’m trying ‘Boston Pickling’ and ‘Armenian’ cucumbers. I’m really interested to see which one makes better pickles. Or, you know, which plant I don’t kill.

I’m also trying my hand at broccoli. This one is really a shot in the dark! The broccoli plants were only $1.99 so I won’t feel too terrible if they fail. The only variety I found was ‘Calabrese.’ It seems to be a fairly dependable variety, but only time will tell.

To round off the new plant adventure, my parents decided to plant watermelon, strawberries, and pumpkins for my nieces and nephews. I think I’m the most excited about their watermelons! There’s nothing like crisp, cold watermelon in the warm summer months.

So list in hand, we headed to Lowe’s in the rain to make our purchases. We ended up with six different tomato varieties, two different cucumbers, five bell pepper, one broccoli, two strawberry, one watermelon, one pumpkin, four green bean, and three squash. As long as the rain held off the next day we were going to plant everything.

All together now… “Rain, rain go away!”