Garden Thoughts: Planning For Planting

One of my favorite parts of gardening is the planning phase.  This is where it is easy to get carried away with the varieties of plants I want to grow, and where I want to plant them.  While I would love to turn my whole yard into a garden, I do need to stay realistic about the amount of time and work I will be putting into creating the garden.  I also need to stay realistic about the finacial costs involved, after all, I am living in a rental and I know it is not going to be a permanent home for me.  I don't want to spend a bunch of money on planting perennials that I won't  be able to harvest in the long run.  The only exception that I will make to that is planting an herb garden.  Most herbs are inexpensive if you buy them small from a nursery, and I don't need a ton of plants to be able to harvest what I would need for a years worth of cooking.

Fall is also the perfect time to start breaking ground on a garden.  Turning over the garden for the first time and adding amendments in the fall will give the soil time to break down the organic matter into usable nutrients for the plants in the spring.  Fall is also the time of year when garlic is planted.  Being a bulb, garlic will be one of the first plants to appear in the spring time and also one of the earliest harvests from the garden.  I have saved some of the largest bulbs of garlic from last years garden for planting this fall.  I have also bought a few different varieties of seed garlic from the local farmer's market to round out my garlic varieties.  We had our first frost here a couple nights ago, so this week is the prime time to be planting garlic.

As for planning the actual layout of the beds, I first need to decide what I want to grow and how many plants of each type I need.  I generally only grow what I know I will eat and my ultimate goal is to grow enough vegetables to last me a whole year.  There are charts you can find online and in some gardening books that will tell you the approximate yield for vegetable crops per square foot or acre.  While I do find that information somewhat helpful, it isn't always accurate because there are so many variables involved when growing vegetables.  Mostly I have been learning how much I should grow by trial and error.  I also try to plant several different varieties of each vegetable if I can because some will always do better than others, so it decreases the chances of having a complete crop failure.

I think the best way to get a good variety of vegetables is to grow them from seed.  I look through seed catalogs and choose varieties that I think would do well in my climate.  I generally try to follow planting guidlines listed on the package, though I have found that some plants do better when started earlier than listed on the package.  For example, pepper plants tend to grow slowly for me (probably because I keep the heat pretty low in my house) so I start them earlier so they have time to grow sturdy enough to be planted outside when the weather is right.  Other plants I will start later than the guidelines recommend because they grow so quickly - tomatoes for example will become root bound if they stay in thier pots too long.  I also try to plant a few extra starts for every variety because there are always some that won't make it and I want to make sure I fill my garden beds to capacity.  Of course it never hurts to fill in the gaps with starts from the local nursery if all else fails.