New Year, New Garden: Planning 2022

 

An interloper, outside my office window. It turns out that the best defense for the garden is, in fact, the chicken wire fencing that I've put around the beds. The fencing is rubbish vs. squirrels, but is enough to keep the bunnies off the young plants.

I didn't get where I am today without planning. And it is never too early.

Planning a garden is more arduous than you might think as the last couple of years have demonstrated. There are things you plant indoors. There are things you sow directly. There are companion plants and plants you should never plant together. Crop rotation is a must, etc. (As anybody who's planted a garden knows. Don't want to belabor the point.)

What I will say is that there is nothing that can't be solved with a good spreadsheet and calendar reminders.

So I've spent a lot of time over the last week or so looking closely at planting instructions, figuring out which plants to plant in which beds, which plants are getting in bed together, and when this all happens, while noting it on the calendar. How many plants will we need? How many will need to be started indoors? How many seed starting trays will we need? Do we have enough seeds? (On this front, a "survival garden pack" from Pure Pollination and some of our own seed saving have given us a nice base on which to build.) And then, of course, there are the succession plantings. For instance, like last year, we'll want at least three rounds of beets. The salad garden will need a steady succession if we're not to have everything ready for harvest at once. 

Probably what I anticipate will be the coolest example of this will be the bed that I planted in October with garlic. Garlic and peppers make good companion plants. The garlic will probably be ready to harvest in July. This should be just about the time that the peppers, planted at the end of this month indoors and transplanted around Memorial Day to the garden outside, will be coming into their own and maybe just starting to produce. 

Another example should be the snow pea / cucumber bed. The peas last year were done in July, whereas the English cucumbers couldn't be stopped from July until September. It turns out that they make good companions and can use the same trellis. So we'll be interplanting them this year.

In any case, this planning thing seems to be a pretty massive project. The full results of the planning process and the planned beds for '22 should be complete...well, I'd planned to have them complete by yesterday, but now I've been forced to extend the deadline to the end of the week, probably this coming weekend. Anyway, I will publish when they are available.