Great “Easy Lucrative Garden Crops” Hunt: What costly foods can you grow with ease?

SEE

rosie383 wrote: »

My spinach has all gone to seed, or bolted, can I leave some plants where they are in the hope that they will just scatter the seeds for next year? Or just pull them out and put something else in their place?
I pulled out all my salad leaves which had also gone, and sewed lots of peas and carrots in their place.
Please, someone tell me.

I gave up growing Spinach last year after it kept bolting before the leaves were a good size to pick. I am now a Swiss Chard convert and can't praise it highly enough. It tastes and cooks exactly the same as Spinach but last for months without bolting and even grows through the winter. The stalks are absolutely delicious too. You can still sow it now and crop it through the winter:T

To cook it, trim the stalks from the leaves, I pick at 10 inches tall, and slice them up and put them in the boiling water for 2 minutes, then add the leaves and cook for 2 minutes. It really is delicious, value for money, and very reliable.

jillh_2

I love mang-tout or "sugar-snap" peas. V easy to grow and always expensive in the shops. Sow short or part rows in succession from March. Also I prefer climbing french beans to runner beans as they stay stringless for much longer. My runners always ended up tasting like barbed wire!

Jawuk

An expensive food which is easy to grow is asparagus. The initial plants aren't cheap. but once a bed is planted up it lasts for years and years and so repays the initial outlay many times over.
Artichokes are also quite expensive but the plants are easy to grow and look very decorative. They have large shapely greyish leaves and lovely purple 'thistle' tye flowers if you fail to cut the chokes in time to eat them. They can be planted to the back of an herbacious border but do need good solid staking, especially if you live in a windy area.
Swiss chard is another easy plant which is decorative enough to be in a border.

Jawuk

Just a thought - Jerusalem artichokes - cheaply bought from greengrocers and have lovely yellow small sunflower heads on them in late summer. They grow tall and some folk use them as a summer-only hedge. The artichokes grow like potatoes and have to be dug up. They taste good but can have a quite 'windy' result.