Plan your work, and work your plan

It’s been at least six years since we last had a vegetable garden. But so far, we are following our usual seasonal trajectory by ordering a plethora of seeds, sketching potential layouts, and resolving that this year we will not make any of our past mistakes. So last week when Chris wrote,

Our plan is to start with four deep, large raised beds in front of the greenhouse.  These will handle our root veg crops (carrots, parsnips, shallots) as well as some carefully placed ornamentals.  These will be supplemented with several shallower beds that will take the bulk of our flowers, legumes, winter squash, and cantaloupes.

I found myself channeling Ralph Fiennes in Hail Caesar!

From our early gardens we learned to plant food we like and will eat often. This seems obvious, but it took two years of growing zucchini and hiding it in baked goods, to admit I don’t really like it. It’s also more fun to grow something that is less readily available in our area. Cucumbers, for example, can be found at every farmstand for miles around. Leeks and parsnips, on the other hand, are sometimes hard to find even in the local supermarket. 

I’m also on a mission to keep our vegetable garden manageable. Previous efforts were sabotaged by 1) planting too much of each crop, and 2) giving up when the hot weather made the garden impossible to maintain, let alone harvest. Every August ended with a sorry mess of weeds, overgrown plants, and rotting produce. 

This is a delicate negotiation. Chris is in the “go big or go home” camp: why plant two tomato plants when you can plant ten? I admit when presented with a packet of seeds it feels wasteful not to sow them all. And I’m always a little bit afraid that some  plants will fail, so I sow more as a contingency. But I also have flashbacks that conjure those late-August feelings of helplessness and despair. So I’ve been holding fast to the idea of planting small quantities of several crops. 

Then it occurred to me: the Willow Greens Farm kitchen garden is both a creative endeavor and a big science project. We can get creative in deciding what to grow and how to make use of the beds, and how to make our garden area a pleasing place to spend time. The science comes through experimentation. We can try different types of growing media and soil amendments. We can start some seeds on the heat mat, and sow some directly in the raised beds. We can compare results when crops are cultivated in the raised beds and in the greenhouse. Some of these trials will succeed, and some will fail. Each year we will learn something that influences our planting plans the following year. And if we end up with too much produce, I know of a local food bank which will be happy to receive it. 

This has given me a new perspective on our nascent kitchen garden, and I’m excited to get going. My next steps will be creating an overall plan for our garden, determining our approach for each crop and designing the experiments. From there we should be able to break the plan down into manageable tasks and – dare I say it – even a schedule. Wish me luck. 😀]