Next Year's Garden

I have received a request to do a blog about garden planning from a friend of mine that recently moved entirely too far away to a farm of their very own.  So, for you new homesteaders in Ohio…this one is all yours.

This time of year is the point at which I finally stand up straight from my permanent "weeding" position and take a deep sign of relief.  It's over! I've survived another growing season and maybe, just maybe, I have put up enough tomato sauce, peaches, pears, potatoes, apple sauce, dried beans, frozen peas, herbs and spices to make it through the winter….maybe.

After that one second of relaxation it dawns on me that I have to start planning for next year's garden.

Unlike a lot of gardeners and farmers, I don't do a lot of clean up before winter rears her cold head.  I like to let the leaves sit where they will, I like to let the dried foliage of crops sit where it landed after I was through rifling through it, and I leave the newspaper compost that was dug up with the potatoes lie where it is all through the winter.  It all helps to insulate the ground a little and continues to break down into compost throughout the winter.  No sense in stripping it off only to expose the bare ground underneath.

The one thing I do pull out are weeds.  I especially like to pull out the creeping malva plants that grow rapidly in cooler temperatures.  They have a wicked tap root that goes down sometimes several feet and they seed out merrily in almost every season.  Not only that, but our pigs absolutely love them.  Did a little research on this nasty little weed and, come to find out, it is entirely edible and good for you.  The leaves and seeds have a nutty flavor, but tend to have an unusual texture to them.  The roots were used medicinally by Native Americans and can still be found in some places as 'marshmallow root'.  So, in other words, sometimes even the weeds are a good thing.


But aside from pulling a few weeds periodically and making my pigs happy, there is not a lot of garden work that needs to be done….except next year's planning.

In terms of planning, the basic idea is to make a crude drawing of your garden spaces, mark what you planted where this last year and then change it all around so that the same crop is not grown in the same place two years in a room.  This gets slightly more difficult when you try to avoid putting crops of the same family in an area two years in a row….which is how I ended up with three more garden plots to work into my rotation schedule.  It is important to keep these maps somewhere safe for future reference because after a few years of planting, the crops all start to run together in your head.

Garlic is always the first thing that needs to be planted.  If you are reading this now, at the beginning of November, you have about two weeks to get this into the ground before it freezes too much to plant any this year.  Garlic is, by far, my favorite crop.  Planted in the fall, mulched heavily and then you don't have to do a thing to it until the end of June or the beginning of July. Not to mention that it flavors almost every meal we eat around here.

There are many years where I don't get too serious about planning out the garden until the deep, dark, depressing days of winter when I have seed catalogs and garden maps to keep me from dying of cabin fever, but I do have to at least consider where the Garlic is going to go.  Garlic is a simple crop - it is a bulb so technically it doesn't need a lot of fertilizer, but it does like good organic mater in the soil.  It shouldn't be anywhere too wet or the bulbs will start to rot before they get pulled out of the ground next summer.  It needs a lot of mulching with straw (4-6 inches of it) after being planted 2 inches deep, but that essentially is all there is to garlic.  I like to plant it in an area where there was a high intensity crop the year before - beans, corn, etc just because it requires so little soil manipulation, it gives the ground a chance to rest for a year.

Peas, collards, lettuce, spinach, onions, and leeks - those are the next crops to consider because they will need to go in early.  Generally, the peas in my garden get moved around from one fence to another on alternating years.  That way I don't have to put up a trellis and their season is typically finished about the time some of the other crops are taking off.  You can grow and amazing amount of lettuce and leafy greens in a very small space, but the trick is to leave enough space (and to remember) to do sequential plantings.  You won't be able to eat or save 30 heads of lettuce in one week, so you plant 5 and then the following week plant another 5, and so on until the summer heats up.  Most of the time, but the end of June it is tough to get a leafy green to germinate and grow well unless you have a shaded spot with ample watering.

Water is another thing to consider.  My main garden sits at the bottom of a hill so it receives a lot of the rain run off to keep it moist.  I tend to be one of those gardeners that doesn't water unless absolutely necessary.  There have been times these last two summers when I was convinced that my crops were likely going to curl up and blow away, but what I have been doing is slowly selecting for the crops that best handle the drought-like environment that Iowa seems to be experiencing lately.  I have a feeling that this is only likely to get worse.  So, yes, I neglect my crops on purpose when it comes to water, but I do try to put those crops that need more moisture in a location (such as at the bottom of the hill) where they at least stand a chance.   The seeds from those that do well in these dry, climate crises situations will likely continue to do well in the years ahead.

The only crops that I don't move around much is my herb garden because many of those are perennials or self seeding annuals.  I just have to make their environment habitable and provide a little good compost once in a while so they can grow most effectively without depleting the soil too much….although a lot of perennials are very hardy and actually like to be neglected.  The one that I have found to like a change of scenery is Dill.  It seems to grow better if it gets a new plot of ground, and will often venture off on its own to find one if necessary.  I have found dill growing all over my farm and, unless it is truly in the way, I tend to leave it where it is happiest and just try to remember where that is when it comes time to make pickles.  Not to mention the fact that Tiger swallow tail caterpillars love dill, so I leave it for them to enjoy as well.

Strawberries are a crop that also likes to migrate, believe it or not.  When we first bought the farm ten years ago, I found four strawberry plants under the rhubarb bushes and transplanted them to the corner of the garden where I thought they would be happy.  The keep wandering off.  Strawberries don't like weeds and they don't like compressed soil so they keep marching their little runners into the areas of my garden that are tilled up periodically and more free of weeds.  I really can't blame them.  So, I have started tilling up part of my strawberry patch yearly.  I move some of the bigger plants out of the way, till up a section and then replant the plants.  This seems to be keeping them a little happier.  I have, however noted that a few strawberry plants have showed up in completely different garden plots - one of which was my flower garden where it produced the largest and tastiest strawberries yet.  I call this my rouge plot and didn't tell my kids about it for two years because I would snack on the strawberries while working in the flower gardens.

When a perennial plant, herb, or flower takes up residence somewhere other than where I put it, I try not to take offense and instead I leave them there and watch what happens.  Some plants just prefer different light or soil and I figure they probably know best what works for them.

As to the main crops - corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash, onions - the thing to remember with these guys is to avoid planting families of crops in the same area.  This means not planting potatoes where tomatoes were the year before if possible.  Beans are great almost anywhere because they help to fix nitrogen in the soil.  Tomatoes and peppers need lots of heat, so don't plant them where the shade produced by tall growing corn stalks to going to limit their sunlight at all.  Onions like it cooler, so they are a good one to plant in the shade of another plant that will eventually cool them off in the hot afternoons.  I used to own an organic gardening book that had the best list of what crop should follow another in one location, or what crop to plant next to another crop for the best results, but unfortunately my sister's dog ate the book, and I found I didn't refer to it as much as I probably should have anyway because most of my garden planning and crop rotation comes from experience that I have picked up in the last ten years of working this soil.  I know just how knobby my potatoes will be if I plant them in one location and then we get a little too much rain….I know just how much my corn is likely to get blown over if I plant it in the more exposed area of wind….I know where to plant lettuce so that when it seeds out it will start growing in a plot that I want it next year.

Gardening is 20% knowledge, 30% trial and error, and 50% just dumb luck.  You can have the nicest looking field of corn only to have the whole thing blow over in a high wind situation.  You can have the most heavily producing tomato plants get decimated by tomato horn worms almost overnight.  You can have great potatoes that seemingly disappear underground because of blight.  Farming and gardening can be the most exhilarating or the most demoralizing thing in the world.

Which is why, at this time of year, I heave a big sigh, I think about the crops that went well, I lay some basic plans for the future, and then I cook up some of the best sweet potato fries and make some black bean dip, find a good book, and wait for the snow to fly.