Cathy Isom continues her series by giving you some great reasons why you should grow baby vegetables. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.
Now that you have some ideas of what can be grown to be harvested young vegetables, here are a few reasons why it’s a great idea to do this.
First, you will enjoy multiple harvests. A full-sized beet can take 60-70 days to mature. The same variety of baby beets can be ready in about 40-50 days. That’s not a huge time difference for beets. But, if you have a 120 day growing season, you could get three or four rotations of baby crops instead of struggling to get two rounds of full-sized beets.
With greens and herbs, the returns are much quicker. You can have large amounts of baby greens or tasty herbs for salads and stir-fries in just a couple of weeks. Also, with baby greens, the young roots still have so much desire to grow, that as long as you leave a little leaf growth above ground, they’ll regrow quickly for multiple harvests.
Another reason you should grow baby vegetables: tastier tops. Young plants have young greens that aren’t tainted with the bitterness of being beaten down by hard days and nights. The same is true for turnips, kohlrabi, radish, and more. So, if you harvest early, you can also use your young plant tops as greens to increase your yields.
Baby vegetables are also great for new gardens. When you grow baby veggies, they have shallow root systems at the time of the harvest. They tend to take their nutrients from the top 4 inches of soil. So, even if your soil isn’t 8-12 inches deep as it should be for best yields, you can still have a super product garden in the meantime.
I’m Cathy Isom…