Too soon?
With the vegetable garden slowing down, I’ve been gradually cleaning up after our main season crops. I miss those heady days of summer produce, but my thoughts are already turning to next year’s gardening. Which, if I’m honest, is almost as much fun as puttering around in the garden itself.
The off-season will be filled with imagining the possibilities. In the veg garden, we will probably grow many of the same crops, and start seeds early using heat mats and the greenhouse whenever possible. Multiple spring lettuce sowings kept greens on our table for months, so we’ll be doing that again as well. We also took baby steps into companion planting, and learned a few things in the process: lettuce and shallots were happy together, but shallots mixed in with the beets were quickly overshadowed (which sounds obvious as I write this, but seemed like a good idea at the time). Duly noted.
I have a lot to learn about soil. Our attempts at growing melons and squash were disappointing, and while we can’t say for certain, soil may have been a factor: they were planted directly into the ground with very little in the way of soil amendments. On the other hand, raised beds filled with pristine purchased compost served us very well, but a soil test indicated they were low in nitrogen, and should also be more acidic. While this didn’t affect our main season produce, early returns on our fall crops are mixed. Could it be that these beds are just depleted of nutrients? I’d like to get a better grip on this for next year and have a plan for preparing the beds for planting.
Irrigation is another project to tackle before next season. This year, we put drip irrigation in the White Garden and other perennial beds. In the vegetable garden we started off watering manually with hoses and watering cans, and quickly became overwhelmed. Vacation plans forced us to come up with a new method: a couple of tripod-mounted sprinklers on timers, which we kept going all summer. But they didn’t consistently reach all the plants, and the spray seemed wasteful. Adding drip irrigation to the raised beds would be ideal, if we can figure out the best way to set it up.
And finally, there’s no end of fun in planning ways to bring color to the landscape. In the White Garden, we need to be alert to the times when nothing is blooming, and act on that. And then write it down. I know we have some early white daffodils out there, and we added mid-season perennials, but the months in between? Who knows. In other areas of the property we experimented with bulbs, zinnias, and a “variety pack” of dahlias, which can all be fine-tuned next year. At the front of the house we’re creating a purple, white, and pink color scheme, and will be adding some rose bushes and peonies to complement the salvia, nepeta, and calamint planted this year.
One day soon I’ll open the mailbox to find a plethora of seed and bulb catalogs. Just in time for endless rumination and what-ifs—a favorite off-season ritual. I foresee several iterations of choosing what to plant and how much, and laying out both ornamental and vegetable beds in a variety of configurations. With any luck we’ll be placing our orders before others have snapped up all the goodies. And then we’ll just have to sit quietly and admire our collection of seed packets until spring.
NB. This is probably of more interest to us than anyone else, but we now have a page devoted to our monthly Garden Updates — a diary of sorts that we can refer to as needed, or just look back and reminisce when the mood strikes.
How do you figure out what you’re planting where in the garden? Do you sketch it out?