Growing vegetables in the Rockridge district of Oakland, California.

by James K. Sayre

Successful vegetables:

Pole beans (green beans) - easy from seed, need warm soil, something to climb on and prefer full sun.

Mustard greens - an easy annual from seed. Trick is to "enjoy" eating Mustard greens: it must be an acquired or inherited taste..

Swiss Chard - one of my favorites: very easy to grow; few pests and quite productive; may live over mild winters. Try the "Bright Lights" cultivar if you want red, orange and yellow stalked Swiss Chards.

Tomatoes - from seed, only decent results with cherry tomato varieties. Nursery started plants don't seem to produce very long, although I had one Early Girl tomato (indeterminate?) that kept on producing until late autumn.

Peas - plant early: they tolerate cool soil - need full sun, if possible.

Pumpkins - need warm soil to germinate and then need full sun and some room to spread out; I had one great mid-sized (11 pounds) Jack O' Lantern Pumpkin that hung from a vine on a trellis: perfect. once.

Turnips - one of the many traditional European root vegetables. Easy to grow. I made a dish called, "Turnip Surprise," because you are pleaasntly surprised that you are actually enjoying eating Turnips...

Kohlrabi - another easy-to-grow vegetable with an edible swollen main stem. Another favorite of the past.

Cardoon - an easy to grow perennial plant, closely relative to the Artichoke - grown for the edible stalks, or in my case, for the towering flower and seed stalks that grow to about six or seven feet high. Very dramatic. These seed heads are sometimes visited by bored English Sparrows and House Finches that tire of the easily pickins' on the bird feeding stations and want to "rough it" as their ancestors did, eating seeds as nature intended.

Dud vegetables: from small yields to no yields:

Rhubarb - although Rhubarb is usually cooked like a fruit, with sugar, its stalk is actually a vegetable. My Rhubarb roots, have grown little in the two plus years since I received the four roots by mail in 2003 from the Burgess Seed and Nursery Co. back East. They only get direct morning sunshine, so maybe that is part of the problem. Rhubarb is deciduous, that is, it drops its leaves every autumn and sprouts up new leaves in late winter or early spring.

Cantaloupe melon: need lots of heat, warm soil and full sun.

Cabbage: mine struggled along for a year, trying to make minature little cabbage heads: it is probably not a good climate for Cabbages here.

Corn - unfortunately, corn needs full sun and lots of summer heat, both of which are in short supply in small Rockridge gardens. Tried the Hopi Blue Flour Corn last summer: got some four inch long ears, hardly worth the effort.

End.

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Web page last updated on 10 March 2005.