Dwarf vegetable plants can produce enough food for several meals during the gardening season. Many of these new plants can produce great vegetables in as little as an eight inch pot set on the patio or balcony. These are part of a gardening craze aimed at people who are busy and have very little room in their yard. Some of them are Millennials and some of them are Boomers who are reducing their living space and no longer have a yard.
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Sugar Snap Peas
Park Seed has developed three new 2017 All-American Selection vegetable seed varieties for release this year. Pea Patio Pride Hybrid seeds are able to deliver peas to your table less than six weeks after sowing. These peas are compact, growing up to two feet high and spreading out one foot wide. Pea Patio Pride are cool season plants and can be the first vegetable that reaches edible size each year. In addition to delivering great food, these peas fix Nitrogen in the soil. When the plant is through bearing, you can chop it up and work it into the soil in your pot, then plant something else.
Dwarf Watermelons
In fact, you can grow the second of Park Seed’s newly released All-American Selection varieties of vegetables in the same pot you grew your peas in. Mini Love Hybrid Watermelons spread just three feet from their pot but produce several seven to nine pound striped melons. In face, if you have space to grow a rose, you can grow this melon. The vines will appreciate the Nitrogen they receive from the peas that were grown in their pot earlier in the season. The watermelons take 80 days from sowing to ripening into a mouth watering eating melon.
Butternut Squash
In autumn, you can enjoy compact, single serving size butternut squash. This Honeybee Hybrid produces lots of butternut squash that can be eaten immediately or saved for the winter. Honeybee hybrid butternut squash are so light they can be grown on a trellis set into the pot you plant your seeds in. The squash take three months from sowing the seeds to eating the squash.
Eggplant
Park Seed is not the only company with compact vegetable varieties for sale. Burpee has a new eggplant called the Patio Baby Eggplant for sale. This eggplant will produce twenty-five to fifty eggplants during the summer season. The vegetables are two to three inch, purple-black, and ready for the kitchen. There the eggplant can be baked, roasted, or sautéed (don’t eat them raw.)
Container Garden Seed Set
Burpee also offers a set of four container garden seed packets for $19.95. You will receive seed packets for ‘Moscotte’ beans, ‘spacemaster’ cucumbers, ‘salad bowl’ leaf lettuce, and ‘Patio Princess” tomatoes. All of these seeds will grow well in containers and deliver a bonanza of fresh vegetables to your kitchen.
Other seed and plant houses offer other vegetables that are dwarf and will grow into ideal container plants. Containers give you the opportunity to grow vegetables in small spaces even if you only have a balcony or deck to put them on. You can select the optimal soil to grow your vegetables and may get bigger yields than people who plant a backyard garden. As long as you have a patch of balcony or sun room that gets at least six hours of sun a day, you are good to grow your container garden.
Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden.
In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.
