Garden Planning: Make Your Veggie Plot Meal-Worthy

Why not plan your garden around the meals you want to eat? This Healthy Gardening Guide maps out what to plant for pizza and for salads.

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garden planning meal, woman planting a pepper plant
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Planning a garden that will reap what you sow: A healthy dish

Good things come in small patches. You don’t need a traditional yard to enjoy a garden – just an imagination and an appetite for freshness. We’ve got the dirt on three super-fun container gardens: Pizza Box and a Salad Bowl. And you don’t need to be an expert gardener either for these garden planning meals.

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garden planning, pizza ingredients from your garden
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Garden planning meals: Pizza box

Pie night gets a whole lot more fun when you pluck ingredients from your patio planter. This idea is a great way to get young green thumbs (especially those who love pizza) invested in the idea of edible gardening.

What to plant: arugula + cherry tomato + basil + chives + sweet pepper

Look for container varieties, such as Pizza My Heart Container Sweet Pepper from Renee’s Garden and Siderno Hybrid from William Dam Seeds.

Best Health tip: Keep the D.I.Y. summer vibe going by baking your ’za on the barbecue. Check with your favourite retailer for specialized pizza-grilling accessories.

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garden planning salad greens, bowl of spinach
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Garden planning meals: Salad bowl

With some greens, like mesclun mix, you can snip the leaves and the plant will keep growing (you’ll know it’s spent when the leaves start to taste more bitter or when the plant goes to seed). Other varieties, such as butterhead, will reveal a larger head of lettuce that you can pluck all at once.

What to plant: baby spinach + baby amaranth leaves + baby kale + red sails lettuce (tossed with pea shoots)

Want to up your salad game? Add sweet peas, sunflower shoots and beet sprouts.

Best Health tip: When you thin out your lettuce seedlings (read the seed packet to see how far apart plants need to be to mature), don’t toss them aside. Give them a rinse and toss them in a salad – technically, they’re sprouts!

Originally Published in Best Health Canada

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