If you have limited space in your garden, you have to make hard decisions each year about what you’ll grow. The most important factor in choosing what to grow is what you like to eat. If you like pizza, summer is a spectacular time—throw some stretched pizza dough on the grill and top it with fresh veggies from the garden, cheese, and sauce (or fresh tomatoes you grew). The level of satisfaction you’ll draw will be tremendous, so I humbly suggest that this year, you grow a pizza garden.
A pizza usually starts with tomatoes, and if you like sauce, you'll want sauce or paste tomatoes. If you prefer to just have slices of juicy tomatoes on your pizza, you'll want larger heirloom slicing tomatoes. You can, of course, grow both. While tomatoes are obvious, consider what other vegetables you’d enjoy on the pizza, and remember that you don’t need to think traditionally. In my twenties, I had a pizza somewhere with grilled eggplant on it, and I’ve made that pizza every summer since. Classic choices like peppers, onions, and basil are a good place to start. But consider summer squash or zucchini, too. Once sliced and grilled, they’re delicious on pizzas. Spinach, oregano, arugula, or rosemary will all help produce a delicious pie.
While some vegetables do better together than others, there also isn’t great harm in planting most vegetables together, even if they’re not beneficial—with a few exceptions. You don’t want to plant fennel in your pizza garden, since it will negatively affect all other vegetables planted with it. You can keep fennel in a separate planter nearby. Also, if you love broccoli and cauliflower on your pizza, you’ll want to keep them on one side of your vegetable bed, and keep your tomatoes, peppers and eggplants on the other side. Your greens like basil, arugula, and spinach can live in between them. The major issue is considering the space each plant needs, which will vary. Zucchini will become quite large horizontally, so I like to have it hang off the edge of the bed. Tomatoes, particularly indeterminate ones, grow quite tall, so you need support for them. Basil prefers to be hidden between plants to grow prolifically. Onions can be interplanted with tomatoes, for instance, since they occupy different space—tomatoes are above ground, and onions below it.
A number of the items in your pizza garden need most of the season to grow. You’ll see tomatoes by the middle of summer, but peppers and eggplants take a bit longer to incubate. In the meanwhile, you’ll be able to enjoy your squash, arugula, and spinach in other dishes. Onions can be picked in their scallion stage, even though they’re not fully bulbed out. Just make sure you leave enough in the ground to reach a more mature state for later in summer.
Growing all these vegetables together will make for a really colorful bed with lots of height and texture variance, but it will also ensure that you don’t have one giant target for specific pests, as you would with a whole tomato bed or a big bed of basil. Those monocultures are like a glaring “open for business” sign for the pests that love that particular crop. Each summer, you’ll learn a little more about your bed, and where to arrange the vegetables in the pizza garden for the best space, access to the sun and ease of harvesting.
