Never plant anything that you don’t like to eat except some crops planted for your animals. In the wintertime, kale is a supreme fresh green for chickens, rich in iron and vitamin C, but it is too bitter for my tastes. My husband and I don’t eat a lot of corn but we’ll grow some for our chickens and also because our neighbors will think we’re weird if we don’t grow a few rows like everyone else.
The first step in planning a garden is making a list of the vegetables you want. Then you need to figure out how much of each vegetable you want. And finally, you have to make a Planting Schedule so you’ll know when to sow seed or put in transplants.
Figuring out how much you want is more difficult than you may think. With varieties of lettuce, you need to seriously ask yourself if you’re going to eat a salad every day. There aren’t many ways of preserving lettuce. DH and I like fresh mixed greens and will eat a salad every day when they are in season. So ideally, I would like five different kinds of lettuce to mature every week. Romaine and Bibb take 75 days to mature, Butterhead takes 60 days and Loosehead types and Mesclun mixes jump up in 45 days. So starting on February 27th, I’ll plant just a few seeds of Romaine and Bibb and continue to sow just a few more every week. On March 14th, I’ll start doing the same for Butterhead and Looseheads. And on March 29th, I’ll start staggered plantings of the fast-growing greens. By the end of April, I should have a steady harvest of mixed greens. Even before that I can pick the outer leaves on the older varieties and have pretty glorious side salads. I’ll explain why I start on 2/27 below the fold.
Other vegetables like potatoes, onions, and carrots can be preserved for very long periods without processing. So they are grown not only for immediate consumption but, for use into next year. Check out this Vegetable Planting Guide prepared by the Virginia Cooperative Extension. Scroll down to Potatoes and look across. Under “Approximate yield per 10 foot row,” they say 10-20 pounds and under “Approximate no. of row feet to plant per person,” they say 75-100. Do the math. They are suggesting that the average American consumes 100-200 pounds of potatoes every year! This could be true, I guess, but can you imagine storing 800 pounds of potatoes for a family of four! It would take up most of your basement, I tell ya’.
We enter every grocery store receipt into an Excel file, so we know for a fact that we consumed only 65 pounds of potatoes last year between the two of us. So I plan on planting a 20′ row of Early Reds and another 20′ row of Yukon Golds. In the Fall, I’ll put in 40′ of Irish Whites and we’ll be able to harvest them as we need them after we’ve consumed all the Reds and Golds. I may be underestimating our need but I can correct it next year.
Other vegetables like beans, peas, tomatoes, squashes and spinach can be processed and either canned or frozen. Unless you have a huge freezer, canning is the way to go with most of these altho I have a personal preference for freezing spinach because it gets slimy when it’s canned. Properly canned vegetables will stay good on a cool, dry, dark shelf for 8 to 18 months. If I end up with a surplus, I’ll box them up and ship them off to my children who have foolishly chosen to live in inner cities.
Last year, DH and I consumed a whooping 150 pounds of assorted beans and 50 pounds of peas so obviously I can plant as much as I’ve got room to grow. And I do so love towering teepees of pole beans! I’m going to try out three different varieties of peas to see which one does best and produces earliest because I love baby peas and want to show up my neighbors by having mine come in first.
The yields shown on the VCE table are based on shallow-tilled row planting. John Seymour in The Self-Sufficient Gardener suggests that much higher yields can be gotten from deep bed methods. For example, instead of getting 3-4 pounds of asparagus, I might get 10 pounds per 10 feet. Instead of 6-10 pounds of pole beans, I might get 17-30! Well, we’ll see. Given the ideal soil and growing conditions I have in my back yard, this will be a real test. I intend to be quite scientific about it, weighing and recording everything I harvest from my garden.
So how do you figure out when to plant? This Vegetable Planting Schedule shows how the professional growers do it. Look across the top heading and you will find a 0/0 column. If you print this out, you should write the average date of the last frost in your area above the 0/0 column. Each column to the left and right of the 0/0 represents a 10-day period. So counting back from March 29th, the average last frost in Eastern North Carolina, I arrive at planting peas, onion sets and spinach starting on February 7th. I shouldn’t plant beans, squash or tomatoes until after April 8th.
Really big, fat tomatoes take 85 days to maturity so if I waited until April to plant seed I’d be waiting till July for a tomato sandwich. If I want tomatoes in late May, when everyone gets a hankering for them, I will have to start my seed indoors by the middle of February and put out half grown plants when all danger of frost has passed.
To simplify my planting schedule, I re-entered most of this data into an Excel file listing only the vegetables I want and putting them in order of planting instead of alphabetically. A corner of this spreadsheet looks like this:
Each planting date actually represents a 10-day window so that accommodates weather interference and I won’t be trying to plant eight kinds of seeds on one day. I’ll also check my Farmers’ Almanac and Astrological calendar to see the best planting days during any given 10-day period.
This week we picked up a load of horse manure and covered the asparagus bed with a six-inch deep blanket. We’ve left it to the earthworms to dig it in. Instead of getting the fresh horse apples we expected, we dug from an older pile that was already decomposed – pure gold for free! And there’s plenty more, at least another few truckloads.
The remainder of the manure went into building a compost bed. We had gathered some large piles of fallen leaves and pine straw from the yard. We started with pine straw on the bottom, put leaves on top of that, a layer of manure then, pine straw again and so on. Because of the acidity in the pine straw and manure, I’ll be adding some lime to the mix.
Now if it will just stop raining every other day, I can get back to digging beds!