Growing A Canning Garden
Growing a garden specifically for canning or freezing foods is becoming a popular hobby these days, primarily because gardeners know just how much healthier home grown food is for their families, compared to most of what’s found in the produce section of your local grocery store. And growing a canning garden can be fairly easy and simple, or it can be more complex too. How much of which really depends on the personal preferences and desires of the gardener.
Canning gardens are general vegetable gardens which are grown with the purpose of canning the produce once it’s been harvest. And usually anything that’s eaten fresh can be used for canning, so many gardeners will simple plant extra vegetables so they’ll have some of the harvest for fresh eating, and some for canning too.
In many cases though, experience will show that some varieties of vegetables work better for canning than others. So if you want to create a vegetable garden specifically for canning, you may want to try some of the species which are known to work best.
You’ll also want to consider what type of canning you plan to do. If you plan to can tomatoes for instance, will you can whole, peeled, or chopped ones? Or would you prefer to make tomatoe sauces and pastes, or even various marinara sauces or salsas too?
Cucumbers are another excellent vegetable to grow for canning purposes, because you can make pickles from them. Even here however, you can select from a variety of different cucumber plants. Some work wonderfully for canning dill pickles, while others work better for making sweet bread and butter pickles. Then there are those which work well for pickle slices, and those which are best left whole too.
Different types of hot peppers such as cayenne and jalapeno peppers are often used in canning gardens too, because these are primary ingredients for making salsa and other hot sauces.
Almost any vegetable you might buy canned in the grocery store can be grown in your canning garden too. Carrots, Beets, Green Beans, and Peas are all examples of vegetables commonly grown for canning purposes.
If you have fruit bushes, vines, or trees, you might want to try your hand at canning these too. Not only can you simply can the fruits in liquid for use during the winter seasons, you can also freeze them fresh, or create various jellys and preserves from them too.
Landscaping Ideas
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Hardy plants that survive year-round
While it’s true that we don’t live in a desert, this summer it sometimes felt as if we did with the extreme heat and drought. With this in mind, I decided to visit with plantman and garden designer David McMullin at his farm in the Klondike community near Arabia mountain — a great place to explore the rock outcroppings and see plants like Small’s stone crop, Diamorpha smallii, an endangered species. David has a collection of agaves and is experimenting with which ones are hardy and will survive year-round in the garden. He is interested in combining these adaptable and drought tolerant plants with other plants that are more familiar in our landscapes like rosemary, yucca, hardy cactus and dwarf pomegranate. He is also growing Daslirions and different forms of Texas sage, Leucophyllum. Although agaves may remind some of cactus, they are in fact related to lilies and amaryllis. While many are native to Mexico and the western United States, there are a number of types that our hardy in our zone 7 climate. Bold and architectural, these striking ornamentals offer fantastic forms and shapes in the landscape. Dramatic as a focal point in a pot or in the ground, they can also be incorporated into the landscape as accent plants. Agave americana, also called the century plant, grows 6′ tall and 8-10′ wide. Its common name refers to how often it was thought to flower and then die. In our climate though, it may take only 15 years before it flowers and fruits. The flower stalks can reach up to 10′ or higher. The good news is this and other agaves send out “pups” from the base of the plant which can develop into large, mature plants. Like other agaves, Agave americana has large, thick fleshy leaves that end in a sharp point. David points out that agaves that are rough to the touch tend to be more hardy; those that are smooth to the touch tend to be less hardy. Agave americana var. protoamericana is one of the fastest-growing agaves, reaching 5′ tall and 8′ wide in as few as 8 years.
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Fall garden favorites flaunt color and movement
As summer blooms begin to fade, I anticipate the arrival of fall with great hope. At the top of my wish list are cooler days and rain. Being the optimist that I am, I plan to add more plants to my garden, and there are many ornamentals for fall that bring color and movement to the landscape. A combination that I admired recently at the Atlanta Botanical Garden featured Rudbeckia tomentosa ‘Henry Eilers,’ also called sweet coneflower, with unusual quill-like golden yellow petals; Salvia guaranitica ‘Argentine Skies,’ with pale blue flowers; a goldenrod called Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks,’ with masses of bright yellow flowers; and, in the background waiting to bloom later in fall, Aster tartaricus, with pale lavender daisies with yellow centers. A selection of loropetalum provided the perfect evergreen anchor for this grouping.
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