GROW YOUR GARDEN "UP" AS NATURE INTENDED

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Best Varieties for Growing "Up"

The following old-time varieties retain their native growth habit and vigor—and oldtime natural flavor. However, they do lack the multiple disease resistance, tolerance of weather extremes, and exotic genetics that have been bred into modern varieties (in large part to suit commercial chemical-dependent mechanized farm monoculture). You can provide most of the advantages of modern breeding with natural-gardening techniques such as mulching against drought, feeding the soil with organic matter, and rotating crops.

But don't expect candy-sweet bicolor corn or lavender beans. Pick daily ...in late morning, when leaves are dry so's not to spread disease ...at the time most items of produce are at their peak ...before quality begins to decline during the heat of afternoon. Oldstyle sweet corns can go from marvelous to chewy to starchy in a single day. (But then, you make it into corn relish ...just as Great-great-grandmother did.) Peas and beans and summer squash can overmature quickly in hot weather. Remove all young pods, flowers, and flower buds if you will be unable to pick for more than two days. And expect slow and continuous production rather than big one-time harvests. Expect plenty of green, unripened tomatoes and half ripened beans or squash when cold weather stops growth in the fall. Then ...do as the old-timers did: use green tomatoes, small cukes, and squash for pickles.

Green Peas
Alderman (Tall Telephone)

EdiblePod Peas
Sugar Snap
Mammoth Melting Sugar

Pole Beans
Green Snap:
Blue Lake
Kentucky Wonder (Old Homestead),
Asparagus (Yard Long)
Yellow Snap: Kentucky Wonder Wax
Limas: King of the Garden
Shell Bean: Wren's Egg (Speckled Cranberry)

SweetCorn
Golden Bantam
Howling Mob
Country Gentleman (White Shoepeg)
Stowell's Evergreen

Cucumbers
Early Cluster (Russian)
Boston Pickling (Green Prolific)

Melons
Honeydew: Rocky Ford
Muskmelon: Iroquois
Watermelon: Sugar Baby (Icebox)

Tomatoes
Tom Thumb Cherry
Amish Paste (for sauce)
Abraham Lincoln (for slicing)

Sweet Potato Centennial

SummerSquash
Yellow: Early Crookneck
Green: Black Zucchini

WinterSquash Short-vining Delicata

Succession Planting

In late spring, I plant a main crop of tallgrowing peas on the same supports that hold the picked-over vines of the early varieties. Then, when the soil warms in late June, I follow the peas with green and yellow pole beans and pole limas. Both peas and beans are vining, seedpodproducing legumes but are different enough that they don't share diseases. So they can share the same soil. Peas do best in cool weather, so they can be planted six weeks or a month before heat-loving beans. By the time beans are reaching for the sky, picked-clean pea vines will be drying out and happy to offer their stalks to give the beans added purchase.

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