Happy New year and garden plan

Happy New Year!!

It is hard to believe that 2019 is here already! Where does the time go! 

Here at Pickle Patch Gardens we are already starting to plan for this years growing season. It is a little hard to do when the garden looks like this.

Yes, that is the garden behind the tractor rim in the middle of the picture. It is also hard to believe that this is a small amount of snow for winter out here. Unfortunately, we will likely have a lot more snow in the next couple of months. We need the moisture, but lots of snow is no fun either!

So how do we plan for our 2019 growing season you ask? 

Step 1 is to go over our notes from last year and see what worked and what did not. It will be a little hard to do this year due to the hail storm we had in June. However, we still have an idea. More on that in another post. We also go over placement, which brings us to step two

Step 2 is to look at last years garden plan and do crop rotation. We have made this easy by working everything into 4 group rotation. Legumes, root, leafy and fruit bearing. We tweak this a bit since a few fruits/veggies fall in different groups, but are from the same family and shouldn't be followed one year to the next. Tomatoes and Potatoes are a great example. Once we have created our 1st draft of what group goes where we move onto step 3.

Step 3 is to ogle and drool over the seed catalogues and see what we would like to grow this year. As we have mentioned before we try and make this a family event and allow the kids to pick out fruits, veggies and flowers they would like to grow too. This part usually has a few drafts as we see what we have in stock from last year and compare our list from step one. We also like to try out a few new things each year so the hard part is limiting ourselves

Step 4 is to take all the fruits and veggies we want to go and to put them in to the plan we created in step 2. It is easy and hard to do and usually requires one of us throwing the plan across the room once or twice trying to get everything to fit. 

Step 5 is creating planting guide. That involves seeing what needs to be planted when and how much. If it can be direct sown or started indoors. We also like to have a bit of succession planting and overwintering/green manure crops too. So lots of variables to calculate

Step 6 is to get the crops that have to started indoors planted. For the most part that starts at the end of April or beginning of March.

So there you go that is how we plan for our 2019 garden. Once we hit step 6 then a whole new set of steps comes into play. More on that in the coming months.

Thanks again for stopping by. If you want to keep up to date with what is going on here at Pickle Patch Gardens make sure you sign up for our news letter. The link is on the left hand side of the screen.  You can also follow us on Facebook @picklepatchgardens or Instagram @picklepatchgrdn

Hayley and Marc