Nothing makes winter go faster than planning for spring. I spent seven years as a garden designer and loved all the planning, researching and dreaming that happens during the off season. As a professional gardener I had visions of color and foliage swirling through my head. Now it’s time for me to dream about a bountiful harvest.
The Garden
It’s been about seven years since I’ve grown food other than herbs in my own garden. This has resulted is a steady decline of the number of seed catalogs I receive in the mail. I currently have two in my possession (Jung and Johnny’s). While I love online shopping, and will ultimately buy my seeds online, it’s easier to read, mark and sort with the paper catalogs. But I’m adaptable and will make it work.
As I make wish lists and mark catalogs I realize that I have a strong preference for specialty produce. You know, anything out of the ordinary: cone-shaped cabbage, orange and purple cauliflower, purple carrots, blue sweet corn. You know what I mean. I can’t get enough of it. They seem like easy choices, but the hard part is choosing which varieties of the normal stuff to grow. The plant geek in me wants one of each.
Oh, boy. The Seed Savers Exchange catalog came in the mail today. Help me.
The Bees
We’ll be starting a colony of honeybees this year. I took the Beekeeping Short Course at the University of Minnesota last spring and can’t wait to get started. Brood boxes, frames, hive tool, bee suit, a smoker, and all the other little parts of the hive you never knew were there all need to be purchased. I will likely order from Dadant & Sons, but I have a specific type of bee suit in mind that they don’t carry. I have another month to re-read my beekeeping info.
The Birds
We had hoped to start guinea fowl and/or chickens this year, but decided to wait until next year. That will give us the whole summer to design & build a coop and make some other decisions.
That’s our spring planning in a nutshell. I’d better get those seed orders ready…
Yeah we need to start thinking about what is going in our little garden this year. We keep refining what we are growing & what we get at the farmers market.
Ah, yes. It is that time, isn’t it?
It’s a dangerous time at our house, since I often want to OVERplan for our small urban garden space. One of our goals in growing food ourselves is to have access to organic varieties of produce that aren’t commonly found at area farmer’s markets. As we move forward with our gardening, though, I’m finding more and more that the crops I desire to grow are some of the hardest to grow organically… any tips? Do you grow an organic garden?
Yeah, planning that urban plot can be challenging – how to choose!? One of the best (or worst) things about gardening is you’re never “done” and each year will be different even if you plant exactly the same things. You’re smart to grow the things that aren’t readily available at the market. I would also suggest you grow what costs the most at the market, such as heirloom tomatoes.
I don’t do 100% organic gardening, but do the best I can and my pesticide use is rare. We’ll see how that goes with a large garden. Lo, what have you been trying to grow? Sometimes soil type (including texture, pH and fertility) is a limiting factor, but there are ways to “get around” those things. Let’s do some research!
Hi Liz,
Have you checked out the Burpee catalog? I don’t know how their seeds compare to the others and would love to know what you think.
I haven’t started thinking about my “garden” as I don’t have any land, but I had some success with one tomato variety last year so it’s on my list this year, as well as herbs (basil and mint). Would you have any recommendations for container-friendly veggies (bell peppers or cucumbers or tomatoes)?
I haven’t looked at Burpee in a long time and have nothing against them. I do tend to order from smaller seed houses such as the ones mentioned in this post. There’s also something to be said for provenance: Seed Saver’s is in Decorah, IA and Jung is in Randolph, WI. It would be interesting to grow the same variety from three or four different seed houses to compare. The main differences would be seed size, germination rates, plant vigor and disease resistance.
Veggies in containers can work very well. The trick is to keep them well-watered and they’ll need more fertilizer due to leaching. Cherry tomatoes work well in pots. Also look for determinate (vs indeterminate) varieties of tomatoes. For cucumbers, choose any variety that has “compact” in the description. Any kind of pepper should do well in a pot. I love to experiment with combination pots, too, such as peas (center trellis), lettuce (middle filler) and nasturtiums (edge trailing). Also, the blue sweet corn mentioned (and linked) in the post said it was good for containers – dwarf plants.
Here’s a good list of container veggies from about.com:
http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetablepatch/a/ContainerVeggie_2.htm
“Be on the look out for key words like: bush, compact, and space saver. Here are some vegetable plant varieties to get your vegetable container garden growing.
* Cucumbers: Salad Bush Hybrid, Spacemaster, Bush Pickle
* Eggplant: Bambino, Slim Jim
* Green Beans: (Pole beans give a higher yield in a small footprint) Blue Lake, Kentucky Wonder, French Dwarf
* Green Onions: Beltsville Bunching, Crysal Wax, Evergreen Bunching
* Leaf Lettuce: Buttercrunch, Salad Bowl, Bibb
* Peppers: Frigitello, Cubanelle, Sweet Banana, Apple (Hot) Red Cherry, Jalapeno, Robustini
* Radishes: Cherry Belle, Scarlet Globe, (White) Icicle
* Squash: Ronde de Nice, Gold Rush
* Tomatoes: Patio, Pixie, Tiny Tim, Saladette, Toy Boy, Spring Giant, Tumbling Tom, Small Fry”
Happy gardening!!