Garden Planning...My Journey Begins

March 1st 2020

Planting a garden. It sounds so darn easy….I mean everyone does it, right? It’s not hard, just go to your local garden place and buy some seeds for your fav veggies and then pop ‘em in the dirt, add water and wait. Voila! But planting some seeds and really PLANNING your garden are different things entirely. Now, I’m NOT the kinda girl who researches relentlessly. I find that really takes the enjoyment out of things for me. It genuinely ruins the experience. I’m a “lets just try it and see”, kinda girl. I can’t recommend a course of action to anyone, but I can invite you along with me on my gardening journey and show you what it will look like and share the mistakes and triumphs I experience along the way. Sort of like watching a

gardening train wreck ha ha! So, if you’re a newbie who wants to just learn the basics and learn from experience instead of research…welcome and read on!

Phase 1: Planning

Step 1

Where you live plays a huge roll in what to plant, where to plant and when to plant it. My first and most important step is to find out what zone I live in. Google tells me I’m in agricultural zone 3b. Now I can do some light digging (no pun intended) and find out which of my fav veggies and fruits grow well in my zone.

Step 2

I must ask myself, where am I going to put my garden? What kind of space am I working with? Sunlight exposure? wind? Condition of my soil? Ugh. I’m already overwhelmed and finding myself more tempted to pop on a cute sunhat, grab my reusable grocery bags and totter off to my local farmers market this season and save myself the exasperation. However, my mama didn’t raise a quitter so I’m going to take it one step at a time.

I’m in a position that I’ve never found myself in before. I have space. A LOT of space. We moved from the city to a farm year before last and I can’t throw a stone without hitting a good garden spot. The challenge is this. I will be starting a garden from prairie grass. So, we will have to till up the grass, let it die off, till it again. I will have to add compost (again, I’m lucky because we have chickens and horses so there is no end of poop to compost) and sand and till it again. I don’t want to use any chemicals, so the condition of the soil is paramount. I have some decisions to make (surprise, surprise). Where do I want this garden? I have 15 acres of choice. I want it close to my water well for irrigation and I want it reasonably sheltered from wind (we get some wicked wind in the spring and summer). I also want to plant some fruit trees and berry bushes. As I’m writing, I think I have decided that I’m leaning towards just soil preparation and tree planting at this location this year.

Full disclosure, although we have these 15 acres, we don’t have a house there yet. While we get that operation under way, we are renting a farmhouse about a 10 minute drive from our farm. There are several very large garden spaces already here. My plan is to plant my regular veggies here while I work on getting my garden planned and soil ready at our farm.

Did you guys just see what I did there? I have talked myself into not one but TWO gardens this year! A dear friend of mine always said to me, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”. This tells me two things; one, I just need to settle down and take it one step at a time and two, I obviously routinely take too much on….

Step 3

The other thing I wanted to consider is what kind of things I want to plant to successfully achieve my two main goals. My first goal is to provide my family with fresh veggies for our rather short growing season but the second goal is to plant stuff I will be able to preserve for the colder winter months.

This is the fun part. I’m starting to pour over my recipes for canning and preserving to figure out what I’d like to take a crack at and what fresh garden ingredients I can grow to use in these recipes. I’m also making a list of the usual suspects that are part of almost every garden. Carrots, tomatoes, onions, potatoes etc.

Okay, I think I’ll stop for today. My brain is spinning but I am glad I have a framework of a plan now. Homework until next post? Picking out WHAT I want to plant. Also, I’m going to try a little experiment this year. Straw bale gardening, so I’ll be googling videos on that too! I’ll be posting links and pictures of my little journey each step of the way so I hope you’ll stay tuned and follow along with me.

Your little seedling,

Kathy