What Makes An Essential Spring Garden Plant List? (If you had to choose . . . . )
Growing like our lives depend on it
I was enjoying my ritual cruise through my Substack feed the other day and came upon this post from
called Dish Lister Pantry Essentials. In it Kerry describes what she would be stocking her pantry with if she had to start over. The motivation for such an introspection in this case, she was asked by someone who lost their home in the LA fires where to begin again with stocking up. Whoa.But the idea of where do we begin again is an interesting one for me as a seasoned gardener. If I had to choose my essentials only list of spring garden plants, what would those be. And I can imagine this kind of debate arises for anyone with small gardens as well. With limited space, the essentials become the focus too.
My Essentials-Only Spring Garden
If space or time are limited, there are just four plants needed in my mind to establish a fast source of early spring fresh foods:
Arugula
Pac Choi
Kale
Radish (Daikon)
Why these four and not say lettuce or spinach or other mustards?
These four plants give you an astonishing array of flavors and textures with which to work in the spring. You can choose just one and enhance any meal, raw or cooked.
You can balance out the spicy richness with the milder stabilizing values if you combine all four.
And all four of these grow easily and fast even in cold soil while surviving mild cold snaps as well.
My current favorites are:
Arugula:
Astro - a fast growing, broad leaf arugula with a rich spicy flavor - this is my go-to spring choice
Wild - a slower growing, open, lacy-leaf type that is hotter than Astro, but holds its quality longer into the summer and is much slower to bolt. This one acts like a perennial in my garden, easily coming back year after year, so it is better treated as a patch. I’ve included it here just to illustrate the difference between an essential spring green (Astro) vs other options in the same family.
Pac Choi:
White-Stemmed - this is my go-to of Chinese vegetables. I love the brilliant white stem and its large thick leaves. Excellent raw or cooked. Highly productive and fast growing. This plant is usually the first to sprout in the garden in spring every year.
Kale:
Russian Red - I often wonder if this has somehow been mis-named because it is red-stemmed not red leafed, but no matter. This has been my kale of choice for 30 years. It can reliably overwinter in my area (and we regularly get -20C weather), and since it can overwinter, it can then flower, making seed harvests possible as well. I love this kale fresh in salads, in hearty soups, and I have recently taken to drying the leaves for expanded use beyond spring or fall. Mild and delicious as a snack!
Radish:
Mini-purple/Mini-red Daikon: This radish grows fast and provides a nice root for eating raw or cooked. However, I also value this plant for producing large amounts of radish seed for sprouting.
Free-Food Options
In fact, all four of these plants are not simply my go-to spring foods. Each one of these plants easily produces seeds for harvesting. And seeds you grow and harvest for yourself means free food later.
Letting these spring essentials go to seed means next year’s arugula, Pac Choi, kale and radishes are free. No more seed packets to buy. And, since you only need a handful of seeds to re-grow the garden, that means the rest of the seeds are available for sprouting or microgreens!
Spring gardening is exactly the time to start thinking about seed saving and how to create lasting sustainability for your food supply. While you can just randomly save seed from whatever bolts, you will soon find yourself with a garden that bolts without food production. There is a little craft to be learned around saving seeds, a little science and a little art.
Here are some resources from The Naturalized Human to consider:
Understanding Seed Types To Improve your Seed Saving Success
If you have ever looked through a seed catalogue or cruised through the seed display at a store, you quickly realize there are a LOT of terms associated with seeds. To be a successful seed saver, it becomes important to have at least some understanding of the common types of seeds and the terms used to describe them.
Why are arugula, Pac Choi, kale and radish my essentials?
It’s a fair question to ask - why not spinach? lettuce? broccoli? beets?
The simple answer is what will grow fastest into edible food in the cold soils of spring. Lettuce, despite it being a beloved salad green, actually grows pretty slowly in the cold part of spring. While you can hyper-plant a bed for baby lettuce greens, it is still slower in my opinion than arugula or Pac Choi for productivity. Same for spinach in my experience, it just doesn’t grow to edible size as fast.
Other early possibilities like broccoli, carrots and beets likewise take so much longer to produce food than the fastest growing early greens and radish.
The one thing not showing up here on my list, but is a must have for me, is something from the onion family. I have both chives and walking onions up already in my garden, weeks before the first seeds are going to sprout. They are perennials for me, so I don’t have to plant them in the spring, which is why the escaped the seeding list. However, if these don’t exist for you, then some kind of onion family plant should be on the list too.
Your essential spring garden list might look different, depending on where you live But I think it is worth considering what you would plant for essential spring food. As disasters strike all around us more and more frequently, keeping a supply of fast starting seeds might also become a pantry essential.
Food for thought!
If you would like to learn how to save your own seeds quickly and easily, then check out my 30-Day Get Started Garden program through Food Abundance Revolution. I detail how to plant a continuous supply of arugula, Pac Choi, kale and radish, and how to save seeds so your future food is free.
https://www.foodabundance.ca/get-started-garden-product-page
The Naturalized Human brings together the science and human experience of the mind-body-food connection. I hope you stick around and become part of this community seeking to understand how the food we eat, and the environments we live in, impact everything about our minds and bodies.
I love red Russian kale too, particularly at this time of year. The stems are so tender, too, perfect for salads. (Although I had some one year that was a bit tough - I don't know if that was down to growing conditions or if it was a less tender strain).
You should do a Q&A post!
I'll get you started:
What are good plants for direct and strong sunlight? Say, on a terrace maybe 🤔
What are some good plants that can live on a high shelf in the kitchen or bathroom where there's effectively no light?
And how to maintain them!?
Also, what's the best and easiest method to automatically water houseplants when you're traveling?
Sorry for the tangent riff, but the list of spring possibilities got me thinking about these persistent questions!