Terra's Garden
Monthly Column by Terra Hangen

A fun pizza garden idea is to create a circle in your yard, divide it into pizza slice shapes, edge it with white rocks standing in for crust, and plant everything in the slice shapes. You can add yellow flowers like marigolds or petunias as proxies for cheese. Plant pizza essentials including tomatoes, onions, oregano and basil and call it a pizza garden.

Those four plants are all simple to grow. Ideally you will locate your pizza garden where it will be in sun eight hours a day, with a minimum of six hours of sun. Tomatoes are recommended as a staple for any garden, and if I could plant only one thing, it would be tomatoes. Home grown, sun ripened tomatoes explode with flavor that store bought tomatoes can never match, whether sliced on a plate or in a sauce.

I recommend that you plant a variety of tomatoes including cherry, Roma and the classic varieties like Big Boy and Early Girl. Cherry tomatoes have the extra advantage of ripening early, since they are so small. To add a creative touch to salads, grow yellow pear tomatoes, with tomatoes only 1 inch long and looking exactly like a pear. Friends will be wowed by this decorative and tasty salad ingredient.

Tomatoes crave sun, the occasional deep watering and moderate applications of fertilizer. Do not make the beginner’s mistake of using too much fertilizer which will create healthy looking plants of monstrous size, with few or no tomatoes. For your pizza garden try the popular Roma tomato, Super Marzano and the La Rossa, all ideal for canning and sauce.

Onions are simplicity itself to grow and tasty on pizzas. Buy a bag of onion starts at your local plant store, plant them in rows, water occasionally, and leave them alone. In a month or two or three you can begin to dig them up and cook with them, and don’t forget to clip off their green leaves for salads and sauces, leaving some leaves on each onion so it will continue to grow.

Basil and oregano are uncomplicated to grow, from seed or from six packs of small plants. My favorite pizza basil is the common Sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum) sold in every local nursery. For basil enthusiasts Purple Ruffles, African basil and Thai basil (all Ocimum basilicum cultivars) are excellent additions to the pizza garden.

Basil loves full sun and needs plenty of water, and is sensitive to cold, so wait till frost is past, before planting. The best way to harvest basil is to pick leaves off of several plants, so that the basil will go on producing all summer. Greek oregano (Origanum heracleoticum) is the ideal oregano for pizza gardens and tomato sauces and thrives with benign neglect.

Enjoy your pizza garden, and invite friends and neighbors over to see your Pizza Pie marvel.

About the Author: For more of Terra Hangen's garden tidbits, fun garden photos of her black squirrel friend, tips for beginning writers, and a glimpse into her own journey as a writer visit her blog at http://terragarden.blogspot.com. She is celebrating the publication of her first book, Scrapbook of Christmas Firsts, written with 6 Christian writer friends, and scheduled for publication Oct. 2008 by Leafwood Publishers.