Gardening | Old Fashioned Families

Garden Planning Series – Getting Organized

January 23, 2013 by Mamma 5 Comments

Garden Planning Series - Getting Organized

This article is part 2 in a series about getting ready for gardening season, you can find part 1 here – Making Sure you have the Right Tools and Resources

I am not a very organized person, never have been, but I have found over the years that a bit of organization can easily make the task of planning the garden easier but it can also make it more cost effective and efficient.

Planning a garden demands a certain amount of organization and planning. I don’t care if you are planning a small garden in containers on your porch or a huge garden with as much gardening space as any one person could hope for. Planning will allow you to make the most out of the space you plant, and with the ever rising cost of food, this is always a good thing.

Getting Organized

To get organized I start with pulling out all of my seed catalogs and a notepad. If you do not have any seed catalogs yet, you better hurry! Or alternatively you can use the Internet for this step, but it is not as much fun!
My goal here is not to make out seed orders just yet, instead I make two lists, 1) is the list of veggies I know I am going to grow, 2) Is a list of new veggies I would love to try to grow. (I make a mental list every year of what worked the year before, what I would like more of, and what not to grow next year.) I also try to choose something new every year to try.
The fun part is to sit there leafing through the seed catalogs making a list of the things I want to grow this year. This is the perfect cure for spring fever and with a good cup of tea and the right music it makes for a wonderfully relaxing afternoon. Make a list of the seeds you would like to get, planning the garden and ordering seeds comes later. Right now you just want to create a firm plan on what you want to plant.
Go through all of your supplies and make a list of anything you will need to buy, this includes, pots, dirt, fertilizer, fencing, any landscaping you want to do, as well as any other amendments you want to put in your garden.
Make a list of any of the new projects you want to take on this year, it might include improving the garden space you already have or it may mean expanding. You might want to learn more about organic gardening or you may want to use mulching this year, after last year’s droughts.
Take a look at your compost pile if you have one and decide whether it is going to be ready for spring planting. Get it turned if you can get to it, you still have a couple of months or more to get it ready for spring planting.
Map out the area you intend to plant, measure it to see how big it is, and keep track of those measurements because you will need them later.
Take note of the sun, what part of your garden gets full sun, what part gets partial sun. Believe it or not, lots of vegetables love partial shade, while other vegetables demand full sun, knowing what goes where can greatly increase your yields.
Now it is time to plan your garden, and once your garden is planned you can order your seeds. Unless you have a very small garden, I strongly advise that you plan your garden before you buy seeds. Nothing is more frustrating than realizing you did not get enough seeds and you cannot get anymore.

Need Ideas?

I have been doing this for 25 years, I don’t really think about planning too much anymore, in fact I have to think hard just to write this, because I do not think about my late winter / early spring routine much anymore.

You might have a lot of questions or need ideas about how to plan your garden, you can ask your questions here on the comment section of my blog, or you can visit one of a number of websites to help you with answers for all of your questions. One of my favorite sites for getting organized is Grow Veg, it is an online garden planning site that has a number of tools to help make planning your garden even easier. They even have apps for your iPhone and iPad.

Filed Under: Gardening Tagged With: gardening, Planning vegetable gardening, planting, vegetable gardening

Weekend Homestead Windup – School is In!

August 27, 2012 by Mamma 1 Comment

School starts tomorrow and with it a lot of thoughts about this past season and plans for the days ahead. School starting means fall is on its way and that leaves time for new projects.

It has been a while since I have done a homestead update, and a couple of weeks ago I decided that I need to try to make weekly updates as long as there was something for me to say each week. To that end I have decided to do a weekend homestead windup which will encompass all of my thoughts for the week as well as anything that is going on around our homestead. I will also toss out some links from time to time for recipes, blogs and other things that I have found interesting when appropriate. In short this post is my opportunity to ramble a bit about our family and our life as well as anything else interesting to report. Obviously this update is late this week; I will be trying to put these out on Saturday or Sunday of each week.

I have not done an update on our progress for months, for that I am sorry; to say that it has been an incredibly rough summer in many ways is an understatement and I just have not felt like putting that out for everyone to see. My husbands and my business went under in June, when our largest client terminated our services. Through no fault of our own, we went from a comfortable salary each month to next to nothing. We have struggled through the summer on almost no income something that would not have been possible if not for our gardens.

As with most everyone else find a job is difficult at best and those jobs out there do not often pay very well. So our dreams of prosperity turned into simple survival.

Don’t get me wrong we have a lot to be grateful for, we have food, which is something we would not have if we had not done everything we have done. But much of our plans came to an abrupt halt this spring when all of this happened and life has revolved around getting money into the house to pay our bills.

We are still in limbo, but I am learning to keep my focus on the goal and not worry so much about the way we get there right now.

I am grateful for the chickens we raised, we now boast a freezer full of them, and we also have 4 turkeys that are growing rapidly and that we expect to have ready for holiday dinners this winter. Our meat freezer is so full we are not sure where we will put them just yet, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. We have talked about keeping two of them and raising our own turkeys but this is more just a thought than any real plan.

We pared down our chickens; we were getting way too many eggs, and despite all my efforts to sell them we just did not live in a good place for it. It was getting too hard to feed them all, just to give the eggs away. We now have 6 hens and a rooster, as well as our ducks. We have talked about putting some of those in the freezer as well but I am beginning to think my husband and daughter are just too attached to them to consider it.

The garden was a success this year, in as much as any garden could be with the heat that we had. I am still picking tomatoes, green peppers, beans and squash with a lot more to go. We are still eating potatoes and onions out of the garden, because of the heat they were small and did not produce as much as expected but we have been eating them steady since the end of July so I am not complaining. The corn was our biggest success, we have a beautiful crop of corn that we ate on for about 2 weeks then I put close to 30 quarts in the freezer for use this winter.

The only problem I face is that my produce freezer is also full and I am almost out of jars. That is not a bad problem to have, but I will have figure out what to do with the rest of the harvest that comes in. Some of it may end up in the dehydrator, or maybe by the time it gets here we will have eaten enough to find room for it.

We have been eating heavily from the garden all summer, salads, stir fries, and veggie plates have been our mainstay, and I am pretty sure all of us have been enjoying the gorgeous beefsteak tomatoes and peppers that we have grown ourselves. Grocery bills have been almost nonexistent, and consist of staples such as flour, sugar, dairy and anything else we are not currently producing for ourselves.

I have planted a fall crop, with a number of different vegetables, I am gambling on an Indian summer, and while I know that this might be a gamble I will lose, I also planted several vegetables that will withstand a cool fall as well. I have beans that were planted about 3 weeks ago, another crop of peas, zucchini and cukes that are already getting ready to set fruit and an assortment of greens, and root crops such as radishes and beets. I also picked up broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage plants in hopes of squeezing just a bit more food out of our garden this year.

I have been canning mostly tomatoes for the past couple of weeks and have finished off Spaghetti sauce and salsa and now I will be canning tomato sauce for most of the rest of the tomato season. Our tomato crop like so many others was not fantastic, so I will likely have to settle for those three things in our pantry this year.

I still have a lot of dehydrating I want to do, I plant to dehydrate my kale to put in soups and others dishes during the winter when greens are expensive and I have herbs I want to dry for the winter as well.

I am also dabbling a bit in seed saving this year, I am letting the rest of my pole beans go to seed and I plan to save some seeds from some of my tomatoes as well. I have a few other crops I will try as well, but I plan to keep this project as simple as possible with the idea that if it is successful for next year we will try a few more crops.

My husband has been busying himself when not working or trying to find better work, trying to get the garage roof on before winter. There is also a new porch in front, as the old one was rotten and not safe to walk on.

Plans for the future include trying to get our online business back up and running again, with a different focus this time, as well as not working for anyone else that can suddenly pull the rug out from under us. We still want to add some animals to our menagerie, a couple of goats for sure and we have talked a lot about raising pigs but talking is about as far as we got with it.

Next spring I want to expand gardens, I really enjoyed the fruit I got from our berries this year, but I want to have enough to freeze for winter use and I would like to have fruit trees and some blueberry plants as well.

All and all even with the all the problems this year has been a success and has surpassed the expectations I had, which I kept purposely small. We will get about 40%-50% of our food from our land this year, not bad considering it was our first year, I am looking forward to increasing that number significantly for next year.

Filed Under: Homesteading Tales Tagged With: canning, gardening, homesteading, planting

Our Harvest is Starting to Come In

June 28, 2012 by Mamma Leave a Comment

All the effort that I made to getting my garden put in early is really paying off, our harvest is starting to arrive in and most cases it is a few weeks earlier that most around here.

We have had all the usual spring crops and also have baby carrots, zucchini, cabbage and Cauliflower and the first signs of cukes and tomatoes. Our corn is waist high already and I have baby peas and green beans that we are anxiously awaiting. The onions have reached the stage where we can start pulling and using some of them as well, and the potatoes have flowers already so I am itching to start digging around and see if there are any yummy baby potatoes in there for us. I must not forget the strawberries and raspberries we did not expect this year, and are not enough to do anything with but have been a nice treat to enjoy.

The weather has been very hot and our well is not strong so things are not growing as robustly as they could. Our neighbor has offered use of their water, which I am hopefully going to take them up on but for now I am watering as much as I am able and praying for a good rainstorm.

Our freezer is about to be filled to the brim with the last of our chickens too so we will have plenty of food here soon. I wish I had been able to get a couple of pigs this year, but I am just happy to have what we have it has made a huge dent in our food bill, I only spend maybe $50 a week even that is sporadic.

It could not come at a better time, our main client stopped contracting with us this week, that hurt, it was most of our income, but I have no doubt our family will eat well because of all of the work that we did this spring!!

Filed Under: Homesteading, Homesteading Tales Tagged With: gardening, homestead, homesteading, homesteading tales

Planning your First Vegetable Garden

March 23, 2011 by Mamma 1 Comment

My First Vegetable Garden

I can remember my first vegetable garden very clearly I was probably 10 or 12 years old and I had been tormenting my mother about letting me put in a garden forever. I do not know what fascinated me so much about watching vegetables grow; I did not even like them that much at that age, but something about watching seeds germinate and grow into food fascinated me.

My first garden was a flop, I only had a tiny plot that was maybe 5ft by 10ft and it was right next to the house, facing west so it only got a few hours of sun, and the dirt there was some of the worst dirt I have ever dug in, dry, dusty and full of rocks. The end result was seedlings that came up but never grew, and spindly little plants that always looked like they were dying a slow agonizing death. But I still remember how excited I was when those first seedlings popped up through the crust of the dirt and I have never lost that passion since.

These days I have somewhat more luck with my gardens although I still have my share of failures. I am fortunate enough to live now in an area where most vegetables grow good, so I have been lucky enough be able to experiment a bit and enjoy the fruits our labors.

Planning starts with an Idea of Why you are Planting a Garden

I know this sounds a bit simplistic, but it is really true, planting a garden depends on knowing what you hope to accomplish, with this information you can begin to decide what you should plant.

This is different for everyone, for me, I love to grow food, but also like to eat it now too! So we try to plant things that we would especially enjoy eating fresh out of the garden. There is simply nothing like fresh vegetables and even more so when you grow them yourself. There is no use in planting something you will not eat, take it from someone that knows, I have planted plenty of crops that I had to give away or just went to waste because I wanted to grow them but nobody would eat them.

I used to love canning in my Presto Canner but time does not give me that luxury so much anymore. But there are many families that grow gardens to put up a harvest for the long winter months.

Pick a few reasons why you want to garden, then use this information to get an idea of what you want to grow.

What you Grow Also Depends on Where you Live

Not everybody is fortunately to live in a good climate for gardening; in fact most of us will find several things we cannot grow. But the reverse is also true; there is not too many places that will not grow something if you are determined enough.

To determine what you can and cannot grow, you will have to do some research, if you happen to be lucky enough to know someone else that gardens in the area, Perfect! There is no one better to ask than someone who is actually gardening. If you don’t know anyone you can look at frost charts, visit your local extension agency and talk to the people at your local nursery.

As you become more experienced you will find out what you can get away with and what you can’t. I remember being told one year that I could not grow watermelons where we live at the time because the nights were too cool. I proved them wrong; I built a hot bed and planted watermelons. I was very happy to share those little jewels with the person who told me it was impossible. There are plenty of ways to extend your harvest, grow crops that require warmer temperatures, and expand your growing space, you will learn many of these as you plant more gardens.

Deciding Where to Put your Garden

So you know what you want to plant, what will grow in the area, next thing to decide is whether you have enough sun and space to grow the things on your list. Take it from someone with experience planting your garden next to the house on a west facing wall is probably not the best place to garden if you have another choice.

Ideally you want to have 6-10 hours of sunlight every day, you want to make sure that the land drains properly and is close enough to the house to get water to it.

Keep in mind that desperate gardeners like me have overcome obstacles where ever they were, so don’t let a few setbacks stop you from having your garden, there are always alternatives. You can put your garden in containers, you can add amendments to your soil to help it drain better or you can put in raised beds. Some people are determined to put in gardens regardless of the obstacles and you can too.

Deciding How you are Going to Garden

When it comes to how to set up your garden there are so many different alternatives, that really leaves no excuse why anyone who wants to cannot have at least a small vegetable garden. I have had opportunities to try them all, I had a farm for a while where I had more gardens than sense, and other times I have been fortunate enough to have a few containers on a patio to enjoy fresh lettuce and tomatoes during the summer months.

There are plenty of choices to choose from but if this is your first garden the best thing to do is to start with a few containers or a small garden plot that you can easily manage.

It is Finally Time to Plan

There are lots of ways to plan out a garden but I prefer to use a sheet of graph paper and measure out my garden. This ensures that I allow plenty of space for all of my crops (although I tend to push this a little bit to get more into a smaller space) and that I do not over plan or plant. I measure out my garden and lay it out onto graph paper, each large square = one square foot or if you are using the graph paper with only small blocks then I usually do either 5 or 10 block squares, depending on the size of a garden you are trying to graph.

You can get the necessary space needed for each crop off of the Internet, keep in mind that you should put the taller crops in a place where they will not interfere with the sun for the smaller crops. I usually put my taller crops to the north. You should also keep in mind that you will want to leave space to plant at intervals, crops such as lettuce, beans, radishes and cucumbers bear after a certain number of days, so if you want a continuous harvest you will want to plant them every two weeks.

There You Have It

The beginnings of your first vegetable garden, While there is plenty more to learn and a lot of experience to gain, you will be well on your way to getting your first garden planted and enjoying the fruits of your hard work. There is nothing more rewarding than growing your own food, it is also a great way to get the kids involved in a healthy activity that not only teaches them where their food comes from but encourages them to eat a bit healthier.

Filed Under: Gardening, Old Fashioned Living Tagged With: gardening, vegetable gardening