Planning

February 28, 2025

It was near or above 70’sF (21C) most of this week, and that after dropping to single digits a week ago.  Warmer temperatures have got me thinking about my garden.  This time last year, I was planning the garden layout and had seedlings under the grow lights.  My main push was trying to collect enough wood, fill, and dirt to create the four Hügelkultur raised beds.  Every step of the process turned out to be more work than I had imagined (and I imagined a lot of work).  This year will be more tweaking the beds and growing methods I already own.  When I started four years ago, I grew everything in container pots.  These were mostly 5-gallon (19-L) buckets, along with several wooden planters left from my mother-in-law and a few large flowerpots.  Now I have moved almost entirely away from my old containers.  This year’s plantings will go into a mix of raised beds and grow bags, along with the three in-ground beds.  I cleaned out the different planting medium when I shut down last fall.  I had also purchased three additional (5 total) rolling, self-watering tomato planters that I put together.   Then it was a matter of planning how to proceed, then cleaning up and placing the different containers along the back fence of my patio.

When I looked online, I found different sites that assured me they could help me with planning the perfect garden.  These ranged from pre-planned gardens (for beginners), to garden guides and layouts, and even complete kits selling seeds and directions for how to plant.  Several of the self-help guides were “old school” and allowed you to draw your plots on lined paper and then add cut-outs of the various plants so you could move them around to ensure the best placement.  Others were high tech with software to walk me electronically through the (same) planning process.  Being trained as an historian I am partial to paper that I could put my hands on, but I was not ready to revert to my elementary school days of cut and paste.  I decided what I needed to start my journey was a planning checklist to walk me through the stages in the proper order.  What I found was literally called, The Ultimate Garden Planning Checklist.  I printed a copy so I could hold it.

The checklist began telling me what to do 3 to 4 months prior to planting.  We are now 6 weeks from the last frost in zone 7, so I missed that part of planning.  I have an excuse as we were in Greece the first three weeks of February, and everything would have died had I started seedlings in January.  There were still some of the later seeds that could be started (6-8 and 2-4 weeks out) but I will have to push to get them going in time for the April 15 target date.  Last year I did not adequately harden off the seedlings and most of them died either on the screened porch or after planting.  I am going to try and do better this year.  It is not subsistence farming if you buy your plants from the greenhouse.  I need to refill parts of the raised beds, put compost and soil in the containers, and decide what I am going to do with the front beds.  I still have lots of planning left to go.

THOUGHTS: Taking time for planning is necessary if I want my garden to produce.  Each year I get a little better at both planning and deciding what and how to plant.  I am challenged as I see the hours spent by Melissa with her succulents.  I have mentioned how Melissa’s mom would spend hours a day working on the flower beds.  I know both are a labor of love.  I am at the stage where my garden is still a labor of like.  Being skilled at anything is a combination of talent and a lot of time spent doing it.  This is true in business, in sports, and especially in interaction with people.  You may get by on a labor of like in dealing with others, but real communication requires you practice until it becomes a labor of love.  Act for all.  Change is coming and it starts with you.