![]() If you haven’t done this for your garden before, the best way to come up with the initial numbers is from your grocery store receipts or shopping list or weekly menus. It’s meant to get farmers thinking about how many bunches of carrots they want to sell, but it’s equally as important, if not moreso to home gardeners I think.įor the most part, I go off of my previous year’s number of plants and increase or decrease based on how much I got last year. This is a tip I picked up from the book The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier. For this, I go back to my planting and harvest spreadsheet and fill out how much I want of each crop. I want to stay out of the grocery store and grow, as much as I can, all the fruit and vegetables and herbs for my household. My other goal is to increase my crop yields. Space for one row of raspberries and spacing out the existing blackberries better. Room for two new raised beds in my front garden. ![]() For me, that means more densely planting my perennial bed, finally installing the two beds I have planned for the empty space in the front garden, and finally planting raspberries and building and installing the trellis I had planned for the empty spot in my vertical garden area. One of my main goals this year, because I have a small garden, is to take better advantage of the existing space I have. Half of the plan will be to do more of what went well and improve on what you identified.Īnother question here to ask, is what are your general gardening goals? And what garden projects can help support those goals? It can be as simple as having more pollinators in your yard, gardening more with your kids, or finally growing a real tomato. If you were following along and wrote down what went well and what can be improved, you’re already half of the way to figuring out your goals for the year. That brings me to the next step: garden goals! ![]() I had some snafus with my irrigation which caused a complete loss of two crops I DID manage to succession plant, my second planting of carrots and cucumbers.įor me, I think the story of last year is that I didn’t spend as much time on the garden as I was hoping or planning and so that’s one thing I really want to improve this year. And there were some full sun crops- peanuts and basil-that I planted in areas that had too much shade. There were some crops I should have planted less of ( beets and cantaloupe). I didn’t get to my succession plantings, which really hurt my yields. Really, get around everywhere, even in my house! While the iWalk is DEFINITELY better than traditional crutches, having my own two feet would have made gardening much easier! I was actually on and off a (hands-free!) crutch most of the growing season, which made it really hard to get around in the garden. The next question I like to ask myself is, “What Can Be Improved?”įor me, last year was a really tough year. That being said, 374 lbs is still amazing, and it roughly adds up to over $1000 USD in organic produce! What Can Be Improved? I also switched from June-bearing to the ever-bearing Tri-Star strawberry, which I enjoyed more.Īs far as infrastructure, I built one new bed, which you guys saw in my YouTube video.Īnd as far as harvest numbers, I got a total of 374 lbs of produce, which is about half as much as I usually get. I got better yields on some old standby crops, too: carrots especially, which I feel like I finally got the hang of. I grew some new crops that went well, too: radishes, sweet potatoes, blackberries ( Prime Ark Freedom and Prime Ark Traveler), jalapeño, and a new variety of cherry tomato, Montesino, which is a keeper. I planted just a LITTLE BIT too many cantaloupes! Planting broccoli as a fall crop really works to keep pests down. My broccoli, which I planted in the fall for the first time because of a tip from a farmer friend, was virtually pest-free as a result. I switched from trellising them to putting them in raised beds and I went from 1 melon to over 20 melons. This year, I was really happy with my cantaloupe production. One of the things I do at this stage is finalize my planting spreadsheet, plugging in all the weights of all the crops I harvested so I can really see the results. The first question I like to ask myself is: “What went well?” Ok, so first things first, go grab a warm cup of tea, a notebook or garden journal, and let’s sit down and go over the last year. This blog post was adapted from my YouTube video Planning A Vegetable Garden: 6 Steps Start to Finish (My 2022 Layout) on my YouTube channel.
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