Planning your Garden: 3 things to consider
Planning your garden – Start now!
It’s that time again. Time to start planning for your spring and summer gardens. There are a few things to keep in mind while you’re curled up on the couch with seed catalogs and graph paper. This is what helps me while I’m thinking of my garden. Hopefully, it will help you too.
What will you actually use? Plant things you’ll eat, not things you wish you’d eat. Four years ago, I went through one of my favorite cookbooks “The Six Seasons,” and planned my entire garden based on the ingredients needed in the recipes. It helps that this cookbook is divided up by season and veggie, and is written by someone who loves Southern food. Don’t eat veggies? Plant fruit. Or mushrooms. Or herbs. Or flowers made for floral arrangements. Or whatever you think you’ll actually use or eat. Gardening is fun, but it’s also work. It’s going to be a lot easier to take the time to troubleshoot “holes from cabbage moths,” or “wilting tomato leaves,” if you’re excited about the outcome. I’m 90 percent sure that if you don’t want 5 pounds of zucchini or large, bland, bumpy green beans, your neighbor doesn’t want it either.
How much space do you have to plant? I’m a huge fan of starting small and then getting bigger. I started with three four-foot wide buckets at my rented house in 2010. The garden’s grown every year and now I have almost ¼ an acre under cultivation at a home I own with my partner. Having a rough idea of what you want where is a good idea. What plants are your top priority? In my tiny rental yard it was tomatoes and peppers, everything else came second.
What problems did you have in the past? I see a lot of folks who A.) over water, B.) have deficient soil, and C.) don’t have enough sunlight in their garden. But all gardens have all kinds of weird and interesting problems, so you might find any number of funky things happening to and around your plants. Put on your detective hat, make some observations, do some online sleuthing, and share your clues and tentative conclusions with a garden mentor. Assessing and addressing these problems at the beginning of the year can help you and your plants have a successful growing season.