2023 Garden Planning, Part 1
New year, new garden… and while we’re still MONTHS away from planting anything, there’s still a lot of work to do: PLANNING. Or, rather, pre-planning because any plans that I may come up with now will likely drastically change as we get closer to our planting date. Enter this new (old) tool that’s been hiding away in a box for the past two years.
Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook by Ron and Jennifer Kujawski
I bought this book years ago when our garden and homestead was just a dream—literally over a decade ago. In truth, I bought lots of gardening and homesteading books and magazines back then in the hope that we’d be prepared when our dreams finally became reality. As the years went on and plans changed, I started getting discouraged and trying to “make peace” with the fact that our dream might not become reality, which led to me decluttering a lot of those books and magazines.
Now that we are living the dream (literally), most of our gardening education comes from blogs or YouTubers. However, as we have experienced in two garden seasons here, it’s been clear that blogs and YouTube videos aren’t quite enough. Hearing “you should do this x weeks before/after your first/last frost date” or “you should do y weekly/every other week/once per month during the growing season” is great, but keeping track of that in real time is not quite as easy.
Then I finally started focusing on going through the boxes of books that had been stashed in my office and found this gift from Past Me. Not only did Past Me buy it, but Past Me held on to the dream long enough to keep this book through five moves across three states. Present Day Me is thrilled because it literally goes over what should be done in the garden week by week, including when seeds should be started and whether they should be started indoors or direct sown outdoors. All I have to do is find my frost dates and I can start using this book to keep track of what should be done and when in my garden.
What I’ll be doing over the next five weeks
Of course, as I’ve learned these last two years, the weather doesn’t always do what the almanac says it will, so I’m taking steps to account for any early season weather weirdness that might come up and wreak havoc on these plans (like they did in 2022). I’ll be posting more about in the coming weeks as I get our seeds picked out and our seed starting station set up.
