Gardening by color

I'm thinking about planting my garden next year by color. Plant all the purple colored veggies in one section, all the red in another, orange in another. It's starting to sound like an interesting idea, kind of like a flower bed only with veggies. Anybody else do anything like this?
-Juli

My garden is right on the main road through my town and so is very visible. People always mention that they notice the colors as they drive by. I planted some marigolds and allyssum at each end of the raised beds just to get some early color, but the main colors come from the beets in the bed near the road, the light blues of the broccoli and kohlrabi and the sunflowers at the back of the garden. Early in the season, the strawberry blossoms lit up the garden.

I don't plan the garden around the colors only, but it is an important consideration.

Wayne

That's an interesting idea, Juli. I know that I like to have vegetables in a variety of colors so I plant different colored chilies, bell peppers, tomatoes, beans, and chards. I don't separate them into different sections of the garden though, because my garden is not that big.

Well I've seen "royal burgundy beans" that are purple and I've seen purple bell peppers and purple cauliflower and purple basil. There are even purple tomatoes and onions. Naien/Scott has a rainbow robin going on in the Round Robin forum which got me to thinking. There is a link there to a French website and that is how some of the French gardeners plant their gardens.
Adkgardener/Wayne- your garden sounds lovely! Have you posted any pics of it?
-Juli

I just thought of something else regarding a garden with colors in different sections...
You would need to find the right plants and/or time your plantings, so that you'd get the different colors at about the same time. Otherwise it will just be mostly green and a couple of different colors here and there, now and then. I guess what I'm trying to say is that planning and coordinating a vegetable color scheme may be a little hard. But, we all learn by doing so I think you can probably make a go of it and see what works. It's a great idea.

I figure I have all of the winter months to ponder on this.
-Juli

Looking through the few, poor quality photos I took, the main colors you can see in them come from flowers and from the wildflowers planted as a buffer between the garden & road. It looked a lot more colorful in person. (My brother inherited the photography genes in my family.)

There are also a wide variety of greens in the garden. I noticed that the Tendergreen beans, the light green band in the photo, were much lighter than the earlier, dark green leaved Provider beans to the left of the beets. Beets always add a deep contrast.

Here's a shot from earlier in the season.

Wayne

You have a heavenly looking garden. My daughter asks without a fence don't you have rabbit problems? Mostly because we have had nothing but rabbit problems.
-Juli

Thanks. I like the openness of the garden but I've been thinking a fence may become a necessity. This is the first year I've gardened here and expected to have problems with deer. For some reason they haven't come around yet but I don't expect to be lucky two years in a row.

I don't see many small critters in the neighborhood. We're surrounded by forest and there are foxes, coyotes, fishers and bobcats, along with the occasional bald eagle overhead so I think the bunnies look for less open places to eat.

Wayne

Juli, I actually did a little of this this year and lvoed it! So did the butterflies..

Don't have pics, and it didn't all work out as planned, but...

I planted bull's blood beets with tomato plants. they really liked each other! And red zinnias with them too.

Then with my triple play sweet corn, (which is short and short season) i planted my short sunflowers, Tiger's Eye. Well, last year they were mostly deep browns and oranges, (this year more yellows :-( ), so between the circles of corn i planted oranges cosmos and dwarf mariglods in orange. it looked REALLY cool. would have looked better if the sunflowers had turned out right LOL. i also planted some squash there, and some nasturtiums, so there was a lot of orange in that 5 by 25 foot bed!!! my favorite ;-D

I planted pastel zinnias with my watermelon and got much better pollination. they are still blooming and growing strong! the pinks were my favorite, and i am saving seed from them. as soon as i figure out what vegetable is pink, i'll know what to plant them with LOL

i always follow my red potatoes with burgundy bush beans. just helps me recall which potatoes are planted there! also...

white seeded beans (Kentucky Wonder) with white sweet corn.

golden yellow sweet corn with light colored cantaloupes, and yellow sunrise sunflowers

haven't figured out yet what to plant with my all blue potatoes ;-)

please, brainstorm outloud, would love to hear your plans...

tf

TamaraFaye-How about broccoli, it has a blue tint.
Well, I'm trying to grow the royal burgundy beans and they have purple at the leaf/stem joints and the flowers are purple and then I had a sweet pepper mix and hot pepper mix that had some purple peppers in it and they had a similar appearance. I also had purple ruffled basil but in a different part of the garden so I'm thinking about putting them all together. Maybe pickup purple onions and try the eggplant again (rabbits just loved it).
I've heard of purple tinged tomatoes like Black Krim. My grocery store had a whole bunch of different types of squashes yesterday all kinds of colors and next week I'm going to buy one of each and try them and save the seeds to the ones I like.
-Juli

A purple-patch, i LUV IT!!!

this was fun last year, wanted ot bump it up!

tf

Very interesting thread...I'm bumping it up too so I can lurk. I haven't thought of doing it with just veggies....I have a pretty mixed garden, kind of an edible landscape. But I'm putting in alot more veggies this year. My intuition tells me too. Maybe the high price of oil will send fresh food sky high in the grocery stores and homegrown is just flat healthier and tastier! Just harvested some fall lettuce (It finally cooled down enough to grow it down here! LOL) this weekend and almost forgot how good it tasted!
Debbie

i'm drooling...

Hi guys and gals
Just a "pass along FYI" i have not been gardening for very long but i read a book about companion planting and last yr it seemed to help, expecially with bugs. The book is called Tomatoes love carrots. Has anyone heard of it.?
I have been planting like t hat for about 3 sesons and the combos it suggensts makes a very pretty color contrast.
i plant onions everywere in my garden for rabbit repelent and sprinkle bloodmeal, i even but a bit of dog poop about 20 ft away from my garden , the smell obviously makes the bunny think a predator is near. Helps with deer too,.got to run kids need to potty
taynors

For those of you interested in colorful veggies, there are also several red varieties of brussels sprouts, one of which remains red even after cooking. I'm thinking that would be a great variety to grow & mix with regular green sprouts for an impressive Christmas side dish.

yes, taynors, companion planting is great, there are lots of threads here about it. Carrots Love Tomatoes is a great book! for more book reccomendations, see the Garden Bookworm!

red and green salad for Christmas :-) gotta love it!
taynors, i recommend you do a little more research on bloodmeal: everyone has an opinion, and mine is surely expressed many times already in other threads. i used the peepeee out of my sons potty chair, in quart jars at the corners of the garden, and it worked fine, i even added some bloodmeal to the jars, but it in no way touched my soil! and then, when he outgrew his ptty chair, i just asked my boys to occasinally "go" out "by" the garden [not in!], or the rabbits would eat it

Hi Tamara
No i did not antthing about bloodmeal , being a newbie to the garden world, let me know your opinion on it or give me threads and i can see formyself , pottychair really?? urine. hmmmmm who new hahahahaha. Got any more on seed starter soil Backyard Gardener has a potting soil and a germinating soil , along with a fertilizer i am interested in , i have heard about bugs in the potting soil from other stores called Plant Health Care anyone used it or heard of it.? I think i will get there seed starter kit too. just for convienence and space saving , don't have alot of rm.
thanks
taynors

I am so happy that this thread turned out to be a good one.
taynors- Welcome to DG! Many people do the organic type thing and they will not use anything that has chemicals or animal product in it like blood meal. Many of the products sold for a high price out on the market used for rabbit/small and furry deterents use urea as a main ingredient. Some worked for me and some didn't. I had a real problem last summer with the small and furry eating everything I planted. Some products that worked were too expensive to keep reapplying regularly. I'm not doing organic so I used bloodmeal to see if it would work as a deterent and sometimes it worked and other times it didn't but I felt it did improve the soil. I have the book Toms. Love Carrots some of the companion planting works and some doesn't. You aren't supposed to be able to plant sunflowers and corn together and we had a farmer here on DG that does it every year and does quite well. Go figure. There were some wonderful threads about companion planting last summer.
-Juli

Breezy--those purple Brussel sprouts tase much better in my opinion too. I assume you are referring to Falstaff variety?

Yes - I they are "Falstaff" as opposed to the other red I've seen for sale, "Rubine".

"Falstaff" supposedly maintains the reddish-purple color even when cooked - particularly when microwaved or steamed - while "Rubine" supposedly turns green after cooking, like purple snap beans, broccoli, asparagus, etc.

Since I always serve brussels sprouts with the annual Christmas Roast Goose, I'm really thinking it would be fun to do a mix of both red & green for that.

I just read "The Edible Rainbow Garden" by Rosalind Creasy and now I want to try this too. One place the book gives to buy seeds is Renee's Garden Seeds. I will probably try this next year!

http://www.reneesgarden.com/

The edible rainbow garden....sounds like my kinda book! Thanks Mobi!
Debbie