Earth To Eats

Planning This Year’s Garden

15th January, 2010 - Posted by Scott - No Comments

My wife and I sat down a few days ago to decide on what direction our garden was going to take.  After spending several years struggling with too much space and not enough time, we started by deciding how much we were going to plant.  Answer?  Not nearly as much as we have tried in the past.  Currently there is gardening space in front yard, side yard, and field, with approximately 220, 400, and 800 sq/ft in each area.  Our desires to grow great are huge, but time requirements elsewhere have proven to be substantially more demanding than we expected when we first started down this road 3 years ago.

That leaves us wanting to do a kitchen garden in the front yard focusing on the essentials: cucumbers, peas, onions, tomatoes and strawberries.  Cucumber, peas, and onions will start from seeds indoor well before the last frost so we can have an extra planting or two as the season progresses.  Tomatoes will come from our local garden supply house.  The variety and quality are hard to beat for not much more than a pack of seeds, without the frustration of getting them to germinate.   Ever-bearing and daylight neutral strawberries adorn the strawberry patch already, but there are a few places that could use a few fresh crowns.  One pack of 25 should be enough.

The side yard are is getting dismantled this year and the cinder blocks that form the perimeter moved back into storage.  It was a nice location but I have learned through experimentation with this area just what a difference a micro-climate can mean to growing conditions.  Moisture would settle in after a heavy dew and never quite evaporate.  When the rest of the yard is comfortable and windy, the air around this section was humid and stale.  So many differences abound on our little acre.

Experiments will go out into the field.  In an effort to not buy any new seeds this year and put the remnants of 2009 to good use, anything left over that doesn’t go in the front will get placed here.  With that unknown multitiude will also go some planned for Halloween pumpkins and birdseed sunflowers.

Last on the list is another test: transplanting brambles.  Six blackberry canes were potted up during dormancy in the very early spring and allowed to set good roots over the summer.  Once the hard frosts break and the ground becomes workable again they will get placed along the periphery of the field.

Planning gets the process started with the first plantings only a few weeks away.  A few short months from now the work can begin in earnest and before too long winter will be a memory and we can harvest the first taste of summer: a ripe, juicy tomato on the forth of July.