Planning 2017: The Garden

The 2016 version of the garden was too ambitious.  Some good results in 2015 made me overconfident and I over reached.  I knew that I wasn’t working with the best soil.  There were things that worked against me, the weather and the poor soil, but it was compounded by too much to do and too little time to do it.

I started all of my plants for seed early in the spring.  I had them under a grow light and on a seed mat. The seed mats are like heating pads that sit on under the seed starting containers.  It warms the soil which helps with germination. I had good luck with these and will do this again.  It was the first year I had used a seed mat and was very surprised on the difference it made.  Since I saw good results I will continue to this and will probably get a few more mats to.

I will be honest I hate weeding.  I hate being out in the heat of summer bent of a garden.  This is probably the main reason I have trouble in the garden.  If you don’t keep up with it the next thing you know you have a jungle.  So I am going to try something a little different this year.  I learned this from Curtis Stone, the Urban Farmer.  If you haven’t heard of him I encourage you to check him out.  He is doing some very cool things. Here is his YouTube channel.  He uses landscaping fabric in his garden beds.  He burns holes in the fabric and plants into those holes.  I assume he rolls up the fabric at the end of the season and gets years and years out of his fabric.

The goal I had going into last season was to focus on items that can easy store without a lot of processing.  Onion, potatoes, dry beans and winter squashes.  While that was the plan the things that the family really likes to eat comes into play and the next thing I know is we have tons of things planted in the garden.  This year with the new baby I will be planting lots of things that will go into making baby food.  So I expect to plant things like beans, peas, beets, and squash pretty heavily.

I am also planning on reducing the size of the garden.  Tentatively, I am going to divide the space into thirds.  I will keep about one third in production.  This will force me to limit what goes in the ground and allow me to care of it more.  We had such a poor year in 2016 that the yield can not be less.  The second third I will put into a cover crop.  I have not decided what I will use, but I am thinking a turnip or radish along with a clover.  The last third will get sheet mulched.   The idea would be to plant the 2018 garden in the sheet mulched area and sheet mulched the 2017 production area.

Paring back the garden will allow me to reduce the time needed to keep up with the garden.  Giving me more time to work on upgrading the quality of the soil in the garden.  In the long run I hope that will allow the garden to produce higher with a smaller footprint.  Which in turn will reduce the amount of time spend for to get that production.