Planning what to do in the garden this year is a great way to spend the cold days of January and the vegetable garden is an important part of many gardeners’ landscape. Whether this is your first attempt at a vegetable garden, or you caught the trend during the coronavirus pandemic, or you have been doing this a while, there are a few guidelines to follow and that starts with a plan.
The first thing to decide is ‘what do you want to grow this year’? Along with gardening, many people too found a renewed interest in cooking and you may have found that a particular ingredient is not available to you at a reasonable price but is quite easy to grow. An example of that would be fresh herbs – basil does not travel well in refrigerated containers, so most supermarkets don’t carry it but is very easy to grow in a container or garden.
Other items have skyrocketed in price at the local markets making the idea of growing some of that produce yourself cost effective as well. However, make sure that you and your family will want to eat what you grow. There is no point in spending time and space growing colorful, healthy Swiss chard if no one likes it. So, start your plan with a list of things you buy often at the market and want to grow. For spring, cabbages, peas and carrots are common vegetables and summer is great for tomatoes, peppers eggplant and sweet corn.
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Your second decision should be where you intend to grow these vegetables. Most vegetables need full sun to grow well and a well-drained soil. There should also be a water source nearby so that you can conveniently water the vegetables in summer.
Once you have these two basic decisions made, the fun part comes – picking the seeds or plants and getting started. There are some good reasons to start most vegetables from seed but there are some that do better as transplants from the store. Things that you eat a lot of such as lettuce and those vegetables that do not transplant well, like carrots, are great candidates to grow from seed. Most seed packets of carrots and lettuce also contain a few hundred seeds so there will be plenty for this year and next. When it comes to tomatoes, the choice of plant or seed is a little more complex — plants are available everywhere and as you only want 2 or 3 tomato plants, it is easy to pick them up. However, the varieties, particularly heirloom varieties may not be available in the stores so growing your own from seed is the only option.
Most seed companies have many different varieties within each vegetable, and it is easy to get carried away so browse a few sites, make a list of the varieties of which vegetable you want to grow then compare the lists. Did you write down six varieties of beans to grow — do you need them all? Maybe you need to trim the list so that you don’t waste seeds and money because you don’t have room for them all. Then order what you need and wait for the packages to arrive.
Winter is the perfect time to dream about a luscious and healthy vegetable garden and making a plan for this year keeps our green thumbs at least somewhat busy.
Kate Copsey is a garden author, writer and speaker now living in eastern Orangeburg County. Her book “The Downsized Veggie Garden” is available from bookstores everywhere as well as her webpage www.katecopsey.com.
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January 30, 2022 at 04:45PM
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GARDEN COLUMN: Planning a vegetable garden – Part one - The Times and Democrat
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