LITMIR.BIZ

      Farmer’s markets are a great place to seek out colorful vegetable varieties and find out which grow best in your climate. Craig and Toku Beccio, owners of Happy Boy Farms of San Juan Bautista, California, offer many different colors of organically grown tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes.

      Given the extra energy from dedicated heirloom gardeners and the awakening interest among savvy chefs who saw the culinary potential, colorful vegetables couldn’t stay under wraps forever. By the mid-1980s, organic growers in California like Doug Gosling, then garden manager of the Farrallones Institute in Occidental, and Michael Maltus, manager of the garden at Fetzer Vineyard in Hopland, were growing tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers in a rainbow of colors. Meanwhile, the Seed Savers organization in Decorah, Iowa was collecting hundreds of colorful varieties including watermelons with yellow or orange flesh and purple tomatoes and sweet potatoes and reintroducing them to the public.

      At about the same time, I visited the New York Botanical Garden and mentioned my color experiments to Debra Lerer, then director of children’s gardening. Immediately inspired, Debra felt the desire to grow a rainbow garden in the children’s section of the botanical garden the next summer. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of course! Children and colorful vegetables were a natural combination and yet another reason to grow these vegetables. Visiting Debra later, I saw that the plot of rainbow vegetables was clearly a big hit. The children thought it much more fun to grow yellow zucchini than green. The purple potatoes were great because the young gardeners could show their parents vegetables- they had never seen before. And the youngsters dubbed the purple beans “magic beans” because they turned green when cooked.

      In the 1990s the movement toward colorful vegetables was well under way. Heirloom vegetables were going mainstream. Organic farmers, ever on the look out for an edge over the grocery store, found that colorful heirloom vegetables sold well. Seed company owners like Renee Shepherd of Renee’s Garden and Rose Marie Nichols McGee of Nichols Garden Nursery offered many colorful varieties. And garden books and magazine articles routinely recommended them.

      In recent years, yet another reason to grow rainbow vegetables has emerged. Nutritionists and plant breeders now know that vivid color often goes hand-in-hand with additional health benefits. Colorful varieties often yield more vitamins A and C and have more disease-fighting chemicals than some of their drab cousins. In the new millennium gardeners will find more and more vegetables like the red carrot and the orange tomato with extra beta carotene as many vegetable breeders select for these beneficial traits.

      Saving a gene pool, making children’s gardening more fun, and growing super nutritious vegetables are all excellent reasons to become a rainbow vegetable maven. And then there are the reasons that hooked me in the first place—growing rainbow vegetables is really great fun and harvesting a rainbow garden is an aesthetic experience in itself. Picture yourself taking a large basket into the garden to harvest your rainbow of vegetables and flowers. Place the red chard and pungent red nasturtiums into the basket. Move on to the golden beets and sunny calendulas. Your succulent yellow tomatoes and the yellow zucchini might be next. Add green, sweet, and ripe tomatoes and green radishes if you have some; these will make you chuckle. Dig up a few blue potatoes and finish the rainbow array with a luminescent ‘Rosa Bianco’ eggplant and purple string beans. No matter how many times I gather my vibrant rainbow vegetables, harvesting still makes me smile.

      ‘Bright Lights’ chard comes in a mix of colors. Here, bright orange and yellow chard plants shine in a flower/vegetable border.

      how to grow a rainbow garden

      Renee’s Garden seeds sprays the seeds of their colorful vegetable mixes with dyes

      With a few exceptions, most unusually colored vegetables grow much like standard vegetables. For detailed information, consult “The Rainbow Vegetable Encyclopedia.” For the nuts and bolts of soil preparation, fertilizing, watering, composting, mulching, and garden maintenance, see Appendix A.

      Starting with Seeds

      A small number of rainbow varieties are a little challenging to grow; for example, yellow beets are somewhat harder to germinate than the red varieties. Also, the all-red and the all-blue potato varieties usually yield half as much as most modern hybrids, so you must plant more than the regular amount.

      Quite a few rainbow vegetables, however, are downright advantageous. For example, purple beans, blue-podded peas, and golden zucchinis are easier for gardeners to find on the vines than the usual varieties. As unpicked peas and beans make the vines less productive, with colorful vegetables you need not wonder why the beans and peas have stopped producing or what to do with a three-foot zucchini that has grown unnoticed for a week or two. ‘Hopi Blue’ corn needs less water than the average corn crop. And purple and yellow string bean varieties can be started in much cooler soil than standard string beans. Purple and orange cauliflower varieties need no garden blanching to be tender and sweet. The only real problem with growing a rainbow garden is locating the seeds of some varieties. While the market is changing, many unique varieties are not readily available from local nurseries. The seed companies listed

Скачать книгу