What should we grow in the garden this year?

My name is Eh Soe and I work in the Farm & Garden group. Today I am going to tell you about choosing what to grow in our garden this year.

A few weeks ago the Farm & Garden group asked everyone who worked at MAP:

 “What should we grow in the garden this year?” 

Some of our co-workers wanted to grow fruits like mango. But, we can’t grow them here in Buffalo. Mango are tropical fruits, and they only grow in places that are hot; for example, Southeast Asia. The climate there is not too hot, just warm enough to grow many of the tropical fruits we can’t grow in Buffalo.


We can grow many of the crops our co-workers picked. Spinach, eggplant, watermelon and hot peppers are all things we can grow in Buffalo. To figure out what to grow in our garden this year we looked at seed catalogues. A seed catalogue shows us what the crop will look like, the type of climate it needs to grow, and how long it will take to mature. Each of us in the Farm & Garden group picked out the crops we most wanted to grow. Then the group decided democratically which variety we wanted to grow most.


Once we knew which crops we wanted to grow we looked at seeds and seed packets.

What is a seed? 

The definition of seed I can give you is: seed is the unit of reproduction of plant, and they are capable of developing into such plant.

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Let’s talk about seed packets. A seed packet can give us the information we need to grow seeds. The name of the crop, the company it’s from, and the price are usually the first things you see when looking at a seed packet. Before you buy a seed packet, make sure to look at the packed date. If the seeds are three or more years old, there is a chance some seeds might not grow at all. Other information that a seeds packet gives you is the number of days to emerge. This is when your crops are starting to show growing out of the soil.




 Eh Soe is a senior at Riverside High School.

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