Sweet dreams are made of seeds! (Planning your veggie garden Part 1)

Gardening puns are starting to grow on me

Being able to grow your own food was once a necessary life skill, even more valuable than reading. Unfortunately that was lost to a great number of people. Although thankfully there have always been farmers, and there are today, modern factory farming has made it so anyone can go to just about any grocery store, at any time, and find any produce they might want. Many people don't even know what seasonal crops are! (Seasonal crops are the vegetables, fruits, and other crops that are growing in your area at the time in question. In Pittsburgh in January there aren't a lot of in-season crops.) Home gardens were popular up through WWII with
Victory Gardens, but fell out of popularity and are only just now enjoying a modern resurgence through movements like and Grow Food Not Lawns and Urban Gardening. I myself live in an urban setting and although I don't have enough space or sun for self-sufficiency, I do grow a lot of vegetables all summer. Growing a home kitchen garden can be a lot of work, but it's fun and well worth it.

The first step in any garden project is to plan it out. January and February are prime time for garden planning. We're past the fun Holidays part of winter and now into the long slog of ice and slush and cold grey days until Spring. To keep the winter blues at bay I like to focus on what I have in front of me for the coming year. Also there's plenty of time to get all your dreaming, planning, researching and ordering done before any roots need to be put down. 

Now I am a compulsive planner, I love my day planner, I love my journals, I carry a little bag of colored pens and pencils so that everything is nice and orderly and colorful. You don't need much to plan your garden space well, just a little bit of time, some paper and pencils, or even just an internet connection. 

There are three steps in any garden plan:

Step 1: Dreams vs. Reality

Step 2: Getting it all down on paper (or at least saved to your hard drive)

Step 3: Procuring seeds and plants (aka- The fun part)

Dreams vs. Reality:

Around the end of the old year and beginning of the new year seed catalogs start coming in the mail. If you don't get any seed catalogs I recommend them highly. My roommate calls them "plant porn". And they are. I get a great deal of pleasure out of curling up on the couch with a seed catalog while it is cold and dreary outside and dreaming of Spring.  If you need some seed catalogs I recommend Botanical Interests (BotanicalInterests.com), Baker Creek Seed Company (RareSeeds.com), and Burpee (Burpee.com). You can visit their websites to browse seeds, and most of them will have a "request a catalog" link where you can get them mailed to you. 

Later on I'll be reviewing seed companies, however as of right now those are my three favorite catalogs.

Take some time to think about what you like to eat. What makes do you buy the most at the grocery store? What would you like to eat a lot of? This is actually a critical point. One year I planted a ton of radishes. They grow quickly and can be planted much earlier than many other vegetables, meaning that you can use the space for more than one crop in a growing season (more on that later too). So I thought "Score! Get some early planting in, lets grow some radishes!". And I did. And I grew an absurd number of radishes. They were really yummy too, and if you are a radish enthusiast I highly recommend growing your own. However, I am not much of a radish enthusiast and aside from the odd radish in a salad I'm not terribly enthused about them.  So then I had a rather large number of radishes and no desire to eat them, neither my husband nor room mate much like radishes either. Fortunately we have a neighbor that does enjoy radishes and so I gave them to him. Vegetable gardening is great for making friends with your neighbors.

Once you have a general idea of what you'd like to grow it's time to break out all that sweet sweet plant porn. If you've never planted a garden before you may find yourself a bit overwhelmed by the options. I fondly remember the first year that I decided to grow tomatoes and started looking for "tomato seeds". As it turns out there are basically a million different varieties. They come in different sizes, shapes, colors, textures, growth habits, basically any variation of a tomato you can imagine probably exists out there.

Don't Panic. There will be lots and lots of information out there. And there are plenty of good sources for help in decoding it. Check out my glossary page for some vocabulary words, and also feel free to shoot me an email over on my Contact page. Or leave a comment.

The best thing to do as a new-bie, or as an expert is to Read The Seed Packet (or plant label). I have another story about the marigolds that ate my garden, but I'll save that for another day

Compile a wish list. Dream big.

Then acknowledge reality.

The unfortunate thing about gardening is that no matter how much information there is out there, or how many different varieties of amazing mysterious seeds you buy, you will need some space to plant them.

Consider your space carefully.

But keep dreaming anyway.

Next post: Getting it all down on paper- Planning your veggie garden part 2.