Growing Your Best Garden

It’s never too early to start thinking about your next season’s garden. In fact, this time of year is the perfect time to jot down ideas and thoughts while they are still fresh in your mind. I’ve spent a lot of time while putting the garden to bed for the winter thinking of what worked for me and what I will do different next year.

Over the past few years, we’ve transitioned our garden focus from fresh eating to what we can persevere for the rest of the year, namely potatoes, tomatoes, pickles, beans, and squash. After never having much luck growing carrots, I trailed them in a raised garden bed and successfully grew carrots with a plant to grow many more next season. I am also planning on doing away with most of my ornamental beans and sticking with those that can the best. While dragon tongues and red swans are pretty, they don’t hold their color through cooking, canning, or fermenting. I also grew radishes as fall crop, which while they grew wonderfully, unfortunately I still don’t care much for them. My golden beets were somewhat of a flop. And yet again… the “I’ll remember what I planted here” method does not work. It does not work. I repeat, it does not work. Using cattle pants as a tomato support and cucumber trellis was overall successful. While I don’t love it for tomatoes, it beats wrestling cages that inevitably tip over every year. If you haven’t trellised your cucumbers, do so! It saves garden space and keeps your cucumbers clean.

Of course, this applies to my garden, and your garden and what works and does not work for you will differ. Perhaps you don’t even have a garden yet, and that’s okay! My biggest piece of advice would be to just start somewhere, because no matter where you start, you’ll go in a slightly different direction the following year, and different yet again the year after that. As for now… request seed catalogues from a few of the popular vendors and dream up your best garden yet!