The Garden Year, Week One: Planning
It’s January.
The holiday season burst and dripped away like a festive water-balloon to the face, leaving us wet and cold and a little shocked in the midwinter bleakness, staring down the path to April with an expression of “what the hell just happened?”
This year was obviously different than most, but it moved no less quickly through the hubbub of making and decorating and cleaning and celebration (albeit in a small, cozy sense), and then cleaning up and packing it away and eating the rest of the cookies, until the new year finds me sitting here on the carpet, panting, and looking at a blank sheet of paper.
With the expectation of a rush of new gardeners’ fervor this season, I got a jump on seed-ordering, relying on some trusted suppliers and a lot of daydreaming. Yes, I ordered way too much. It’s a thing we do.
Now, the planning sessions begin.
I think the garden-planning stage has a bell-curve of both use and value, which can seemingly drain motivation from the “average” gardener. On one end, the professional, who uses graph paper and CAD programs to uber-design a space that none of us are ever going to make for ourselves. This expectation is not only unrealistic, it’s simply not very useful to the average gardener - too much work, not enough reward.
On the other end (and far more often), the novice sketches out every plant and location, painting in the diagrams with matching colors, writing their children’s or dog’s or neighbors’ dog’s names in marigolds, and ensuring that every single seed they purchase will have its own tidy little home. Then, reality sets in, and half the seeds don’t germinate, or the new tomato they were excited about barrels through the garden like a mudslide, absorbing all their perfect diagramming, the cabbage is all dead from club root, and worse, half the marigolds which spell out their dog’s name died, so now it spells something deeply vulgar.
Don’t get me wrong: over-planning is a real trap, and I continue to overplan a little every year, but I temper it with just enough of a lassez-faire attitude that pulls the successes through with vigor, and composts the failures with no mercy.
So as I loll around on the rug with my seed packets and drawing paper, I plan with a few basic questions in mind:
) TIMELINE:
When is each area available? My best example is my garlic-bed, which I planted back on Hallowe’en, and is currently soundly sleeping beneath a pile of mulch. Garlic abhors crowding and competition, and so when the snow recedes, that bed is untouchable as the tiny green shoots skewer their way sunward. However, I harvest the garlic in late June or so, which means that by early July I have an empty bed! So, I plan that bed as a “summer crop” of either something that requires heat to flourish, but doesn’t need a terribly long timeline (bush beans, for example), or as something that I’ve been nurturing on in pots but will be ready to stretch its legs by midsummer (like hot chiles). I plan similarly for early spring crops like snap peas, radishes, japanese turnips, and greens that will burn out as summer gets hot - they all get replaced with sunflowers, runner beans, and verbena, as well as some fall-crops like chicory and carrots. that can start in mid-to-late summer for an extended (and better quality) harvest as it gets cold.
This goes for herbs and ornamentals as well; cilantro wilts in summer hear, and linaria blooms itself to death by July 1; replace them with basil and bachelors’ buttons, and you won’t end up with a scraggly hole in your bed.
What are you planting that enjoys the colder weather of spring?
What are you planting that requires the heat of summer?
Can these two crops be switched out in the same bed?) SIZE
This one seems obvious, and yet…
Plants need their own amounts of sun, water, and nutrition. Packing things in to a space that’s too small for the size of the mature plant will end up in stunted, stressed, disease-prone underperformers. Now, we can never be exactly sure - I’ve had “dwarf” varieties grow into monsters, and plants that are usually huge never really take off…. but still - visualize how your plants will grow together and give them room to succeed.
That said…. underplanting can also be less-than-ideal. A well-filled garden bed helps conserve water and shade out weeds. It’s not abstract minimalism - it’s nature. Most plants are fine with neighbors, so long as they can lay claim to what they need.
Be on the attention for plants with certain needs, however - some plants (garlic, raspberries) hate competition and will suffer with even a seemingly innocuous amount of neighborly company. Conversely, some plants don’t care at all about cozying up together - especially planting a deep-rooted plant (carrots) among a shallow-rooted plant (scallions) - they both will thrive in their own “soil area” and be perfectly content sharing a patch together.
How big will everything get?
How aggressively do they tend to grow (both root-aggression and top-growth)?HEALTH
Disease stress and soil fertility can be an issue for you to include in your garden planning. Many major tomato-diseases are soil-borne, and can easily overwinter. If you continue to plant tomatoes in the same spot, you’re constantly increasing the disease-load in the soil, and guaranteeing earlier and worse outbreaks of whichever blights are killing off your toms every year. Rotate your sensitive crops to give the soil a few years to “empty out” the pathogens.
Hungry plants, like tomatoes, potatoes, and cabbage-relatives, can drain the soil of fertility, leaving little behind for the next year. Rotate these crops to fresh, fertile areas, and give the old spot some enrichment, plus a year with fertility-improving crops, like beans and peas (which add nitrogen to the soil).
Companion-planting is another concept to entertain, though a great deal of it is simply folklore, with no actual science involved. I won’t get into the details now, but there’s a new book by Jessica Walliser that takes a scientific approach to companion-planting, which I really recommend: Plant Partners: Science-Based Companion Planting Strategies for the Vegetable GardenUSE
I love basil, and use it all the time. I make a salad every day. Why on earth did I plant my basil and lettuce at the farthest point in the garden from the door?
Think about how you want to use your garden - if you’re planting flowers for cutting, ensure they’re accessible, so you’re not trampling alyssum while trying to reach your zinnias. If you have a sitting area, make sure it won’t be overgrown with spiky, smelly Datura by august. Don’t interplant poisonous ornamentals with herbs you’ll be cooking with.
All common-sense things, but every year I seem to overlook something silly…HISTORY
I should have taken better notes.
I should always have taken better notes.
When I die, that will be on my headstone: “he should have taken better notes.”
But still, I can take a meditative moment and think back on having grown gardens in my past.
”They say full sun on the pack, but my Viscaria bloom better with afternoon shade…”
”Tomatoes always seem to struggle in this corner…”
”Last year’s lettuce was the best it’s ever been…”
I’ll write statements down like these so I can see them in-person, and use them to help guide me into planning with my successes and lessons from the past at-hand.
In all, no amount of planning will negate nature’s impact, or absolve you from your responsibility to care for your garden. There will always be that horrible cold snap that nixes all your perfect plans, or that surprise two-week vacation you take that leaves your unattended garden a pile of sticks. However, with some thoughtful planning this first week of January, I can hope to at least stack the deck in my favor.
And moreso, the garden in my mind and on my paper will keep me holding on until that warm, wet afternoon when I see the first whiskers of crocus poking through…
Is it spring yet?