We all know how important it is to have your child eat well balanced meals, especially when it means including vegetables. Aside from french fried potatoes and buttered corn, is your child getting a full range of the nutritionally rich vegetables that are considered the “Rainbow Foods”?

It used to be we encouraged children to eat their greens: broccoli, spinach, zucchini, beans. Now we can expand this color palate to include healthy veggies, all in rainbow colors. We are blessed to live in an area so agriculturally diverse: fresh, organic produce is available at your local farmer’s market, and “U Pick Farms” can be a wonderful day trip for your family. Don’t want to leave the house? You can participate in a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture and produce will be delivered to your door.

Perhaps the best way to encourage your child to eat a variety of vegetables is to put them to work! Have them help plant their very own garden. Many of these vegetables can easily be grown in containers, too. Just 1 tomato, zucchini or cucumber will produce a significant amount of food. Warning: if you send your child out into the garden to harvest beans for dinner, don’t be surprised if they get eaten before making it into the kitchen!

Sample of Rainbow foods to plant this Spring:

Red: red tomatoes, red peppers, beets
Orange: orange peppers, carrots, beets
Yellow: yellow tomatoes, beans, squash, peppers, corn
Green: beans, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, peas
Blue: potatoes
Purple: purple beans (which turn green when cooked), eggplant, peppers

Happy Gardening!

Debbie Togliatti has her own gardening business: Weed It and Reap: Garden Restoration and Design and is a teacher who gets young children involved in gardening and nature experiences. She lives in the Bay Area of Northern California.

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Gardening is a low-cost pleasure. There is something meditative about being in nature, making things grow. The only problem is, I’ve never been very good at it. I’ve even been known to plant things upside-down, with the roots swaying in the air like the audience at a rock concert.

My cousin Gordon, on the other hand, keeps a dwarf lemon tree in his sunny Connecticut dining room, and artificially inseminates the plant by pretending to be a bee: he gently rubs the center of each blossom with a cotton swab. I’ve seen bright yellow lemons on Gordon’s tree on a snowy winter’s day. To a brown-thumbed dolt like me, this is magic!

I became a more successful when we moved to L. A., because everything grows here, even for lazy incompetents like me. Our house is a rental, so I haven’t invested in serious landscaping. I just have a Hodge-podge of vegetation from various inexpensive sources.

FREE AND ALMOST/FREE

Some of my plants were cuttings or exchanges from friends. Every gardener has surplus plantings. I myself have given away enough agave to make a case of tequila. I’ve also been on the receiving end of other people’s surplus, like some heirloom tomatoes: L. A.’s trendiest veggie. And – since zero is my favorite number – I’m about to follow up on a Craig’s List ad for free bromeliads. I also got around 20 bags of free mulch on Craig’s List, which saved me a bundle.

Other plants were bought at farmer’s markets, where the prices are much lower than at the stores. I just paid seventy-five cents for a six-pack of impatience, which would have been $2.50 at the nursery.

I’D LIKE TO THANK MY AGENT

My greatest gardening triumph was my Creative Artists Agency geranium. I was walking past the CAA building in Beverly Hills, which was adorned with many bright red geraniums. One four-inch stem had broken off and was lying on the pavement. I rescued it, and stuck it in the ground when I got home. It grew into a thick, healthy shrub.

Then my landlord decided to put up a six-foot-high chain link fence along one side of the house – creating all the cozy charm of a prison yard. I cut a dozen stems from my CAA shrub, and planted them along the noxious fence. Today, what separates us from the house next door is a 6-foot-high wall of thick greenery dotted with sunny red flowers. Cost to me: nada. Plus, I have the added prestige of having the only fence in Los Angeles that is represented by the Creative Artists Agency.

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Sunflowers!

They can be tall, short, or in between, yellow, orange or red, ornamental or edible. It’s a summer favorite of young and old alike and hopefully there’s room in your garden for at least one helianthus annuus, more commonly known as the sunflower.

Sunflowers are easy to grow to from seed. Simply sow them directly into the soil where you want them to grow. Give them rich soil, ample water and with plenty of sunshine, they’ll do the rest. If you don’t want to go the seed route, many nurseries offer sunflower seedlings, some already in bud.

Sunflowers can be categorized by ornamental types or those with edible seeds. Ornamentals, those best suited for cutting, are generally more compact and branching with a wide range of colors and names: Lemon Eclair, Prado Red, Velvet Queen and Cinnamon are just a few available for the home garden.

When selecting flowers for cutting, choose blooms that are barely showing any color as these will last longer. Cut the stem at a 45 degree angle anywhere between 1 and 1 1/2 feet from under the flower head. Immediately place in a vase of water. Once cut, sunflowers can last in water from 6 to 12 days providing the water is replaced every 3 days and the water level kept full.

The giant sunflowers, aptly named Mammoth, grow from a single stalk with big faces of golden yellow petals, brown centers and gray and white striped seeds. To harvest the seeds, wait until the petals drop and the seed kernels swell. Preserving the flower head is crucial: provide some kind of covering around the head such as a mesh or paper bag so the birds and squirrels don’t make off with the seeds! Cut the stalk at the base when the seeds have a hard shell. Let the seeds completely dry before eating or using in a bird feeder.

Debra Togliatti has her own gardening business: Weed It and Reap: Garden Restoration and Design and is a teacher who gets young children involved in gardening and nature experiences. She lives in the Bay Area of Northern California.

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Seed Starting

Late winter is the perfect time to start seeds indoor. You don’t need to have a greenhouse or green thumb: starting seeds are easy, fun and an economical way to get the plants you desire for your home garden. If you don’t have any experience, chances are your child has done this in school! All you need to start this project is good potting soil, containers and a spray bottle for watering and seeds!

Seed Starting Basics

To start your seeds indoors, you’ll need a potting soil mix (preferably a seed starting mix), containers for the seeds and whatever seeds you want to grow. Some seeds are best sowed directly in the ground in spring (sunflowers, for example) and others do better if just broadcast into the soil like California Poppies or wildflowers. Ideal seeds to start indoors are those hardy sun lovers like cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkins, corn or beans. Just about anything can serve as a container from egg cartons, plastic or clay pots just as long as it has drainage holes. Be “eco-thrifty” and creative!

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Now that your low water-need plants are in and you have some irrigation, there’s one more important step to take in your garden to save you money and water: adding mulch. Mulching means applying a material, preferably organic, to exposed soil. Its purpose is to maintain soil moisture so that less water is needed. A side benefit is that mulch can suppress weed growth. An organic mulch will decompose over time, not only improving soil conditions but reducing soil erosion as well.

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Whether you have a big backyard or live in a small apartment, it’s easy to turn your kitchen scraps into garden rich compost, suitable for your indoor or outdoor plants. This type of home composting can be achieved on a small or large scale. This article will address the simplest, easiest and least expensive means of composting: the compost bucket.

What Can Be Composted:

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