The Black Garden

Ever since I've started gardening and looking at seed catalogs, I've been fascinated with the dark vegetables! Many of them I've never seen before. And of course, me loving the color black, I thought all the dark colored vegetables were so cool. It didn't take long for me to come up with the idea, to grow a "black garden"!

Oftentimes, those vegetables have "black" in their name, although most of them are dark purple. So maybe it would d just be a "dark garden" rather than totally black. We'll just assume for vegetables, whatever the darkest color is you can get, that's what we call black.

I even have a black garden board on Pinterest!

Black Garden Pinterest Board

So the idea has been around for a while, but this year, I'm actually doing it! 😁

My sister-in-law talked me into it with the idea that I could use the experience to create a blog series. Having this specific project to write about could get me going on the whole blogging thing -which I'm still not sure about- and keep me going with updates all through the summer!

And maybe, she thought, I could even turn it into an article and sell it to a magazine... 😃

That would be cool!

Well, let's see how we can get started first...

I do already have some dark vegetable seeds. Time to dig through the seed baskets...

Here's what I found:

I tried all of these last year, and to be honest, none of them did well. 😒

But we don't talk about that. 😉

Next step: Look through all seed catalogs I can find and mark all the dark vegetables. 😃🖤

Ah man... I'm out of the little tab sticky notes.

I was gonna use the same color tab, blue or purple on all of them. But I don't have enough. Suddenly I am convinced that for this project I need special sticky tabs! Could there be such a thing as black sticky notes?

Whaaaat??? No way! 😄

I need these!

Buy Now 👆 yep!

I couldn't find any tab sized ones. Oh well, I can just cut them to size...

So cool! 😁🖤 >Enjoy the little (black) things! 🤓

Ok, I'm ready! 😊

Let's get pagin'...

😮 That's a lot!

"Uhm... honeeeeyyy!!! I'm gonna need to raise my gardening budget!"

🤪🤭

Of course, there's a lot of duplicates still between the different catalogs! I just marked EVERYTHING DARK! 😁🖤 ...almost

That was just the first round.

Now I have to go through and decide which specific variety to get and from which company. I'm not gonna get EVERY dark variety of the same vegetable, I'm gonna compare them and pick the darkest of each! I didn't mark flowers or other plants, and no F1 varieties! I don't want those! Only originals!

There are a lot of beautiful flowers!🪻I might get back to those...

I'm gonna need some seeds, that they don't have a black version of in the catalogs I have. Cucumbers for example. Should I look into that? Maybe there is a dark cucumber out there somewhere... 🤷🏽‍♀️ Anybody know of one?

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I can announce a few winners already!

The Tomato, Cherry Tomato and Tomatillo Winners! 🏆🍅

The Bell Pepper Winner! 🫑 🥇

Here the problem is, which catalog do I order them from, since they both have that same purple beauty variety?

Eggplant, Broccoli and Kohlrabi Winners! 🏅

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Wow! I have to say, that got a little overwhelming! Its so hard to decide what to order where, so I thought, I'll just focus on the vegetables I need to start soon for now so I can get those ordered. To get them all figured and still be able to order with plenty of time, would stress me out, and that's no fun! So I'll just have to order twice.

So here's my order:

So what do we have so far?

Black:

✓ Cauliflower

✓ Tomatoes

✓ Cabbage

✓ Kohlrabi

✓ Runner Beans

✓ Broccoli

✓ Cherry Tomatoes

✓ Tomatillos

✓ Another type of cabbage

✓ Pincushion Flowers

✓ Bell Peppers

✓ Rat Tail Radish

✓ Eggplants

I'm ordering these from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Annie's Heirloom Seeds and Seed Savers Exchange.

Disclaimer: This blog is not sponsored by any of these companies! All items were attained by the use of husband's money! 😜🤭

So now.... we wait...

While we wait though, we will also take a closer look at the other marked black vegetables, and pick some winners.

To be continued...

(Give me a 🖤 if you read this blog! I'm just curious how many of the "views" are actually people who read it.)