If you’re new to gardening and just getting started, it can be overwhelming opening a seed catalog or staring at the homepage of a seed company’s website! What should you grow? What things are easy/hard to grow? How much space and time do you need for various crops, etc. Here are some tips to get you off on the right foot.
First of all, when you open a seed catalog, you’ll see many different categories. The usual beans, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, corn, lettuce, herbs, onions, tomatoes, peppers, summer squash, winter squash, and melons. You might also see things you’re not as accustom to eating like beets, eggplant, collards (yeah, I still don’t really know what these are for), okra, and Romanesco (fancy variant of cauliflower). With so many options, where do you start? Well, as is often said, it’s best to start at the beginning. In other words, what do you like to eat/know how to cook?
1. Decide what you like to eat the most?
It’s all fine and dandy to daydream about getting more green veggies in your diet (broccoli, beans, spinach, and the like). But if you don’t love to eat them or feel confident cooking them, you’ll be hard pressed to keep at it when the going gets tough. On the other hand, if you can whip up a mean spaghetti and know your way around a sheet pan of roasted winter veggies, you’ll have the motivation you need to keep at it when the late frost threatens your tender tomato starts or the bees aren’t giving you a hand with the pollination of your winter squash.
2. Start Small: Focus on 2-3 of your favorite crops
Once you’ve figured out what you like to eat and/or preserve, pick 2-3 crops to focus on the first year. Go ahead and fill in here and there with other plants, but learn all you can about your main crops and let the others be experimental. Don’t try to learn about and grow everything your first season. If restaurants are any example, the ones with a more limited menu usually serve the best food while the ones that serve a little of everything are generally mediocre. Start with your favorite veggies or fruits and get comfortable growing those, then start branching out into other categories.
For us, the big 3 were tomatoes, peppers, and winter squash. Though our first year, we tried a little bit of everything and didn’t have fantastic results with a whole lot. Once we realized we needed to specialize more in the things we enjoyed eating, we had better success.
Pro tip: Focus on getting really good at growing the things you like to eat and if you want to experiment with veggies your not so familiar with, make a trip to the farmers market or your local produce section and experiment with some of the options there. You may find that artichokes aren't worth the space and time to grow when they take equally as much time and space to prepare in the kitchen for a very small (though quite scrumptious) return. But on the other hand, you may learn that you love roasted or stir-fried broccoli and it only takes a few minutes to whip up as a side dish for your favorite meals.
3. Evaluate your space
The next step is to evaluate your space. If you have a lot of space, then go all in on vining and sprawling plants or those that like a little elbow room. If your space is smaller, like mine, you’ll have to get creative. Look for compact plants such as bush acorn squash rather than sprawling 30ft long Hubbard squash vines. Figure out ways to grow plants vertically such as trellising tomato vines, allowing peas and pole beans to climb a fence, or growing herbs in pots on your patio.
Ideas for the space conscious gardener:
- Dwarf Tomatoes like the Wizard of Oz Container Series (or trellised and pruned indeterminate tomatoes)
- Compact pepper plants like Nepali Orange
- Pole beans
- Bush squash or cucumbers
- Herbs (can be grown in pots on your patio)
- Greens (grow them in pots as well; they can be quite ornamental if you pick different leaf shapes and colors)
For the gardeners who have more space than they know what to do with:
- Root crops (to get any sizeable harvest, you actually have to devote a good deal of space to root crops)
- Vining squash plants like Hubbards and pumpkins
- Bush beans (way easier to harvest than pole beans, but similar to root crops, you need a lot of plants in order to get a sizeable harvest)
- Indeterminate tomatoes such as Church or Cherokee Purple
- Cabbage, Broccoli, and other brassicas
4. Decide Where to Put the Plants
Then, once you figure out what you’re growing and what you have space for, decide where you’ll plant each crop. Now this is where a lot of people end up lost in the weeds (no pun intended). You can spend days trying to figure out companion planting and which crops grow nicely together and which ones supposedly do not like to share their space.
But really, when it comes right down to it, do what makes sense for you. What makes sense for convenience of harvesting and maneuvering in the garden? Or what looks nice growing together. Just because Onions and tomatoes play nice together doesn’t mean you want to be getting tangled up in onion tops when you’re trying to pick the tomatoes.
5. The When…when to get your starts and how much time you have to grow them
Once you’ve figured out what and where, you’ll need to figure out the when. And this is the step a lot of people miss. People tend to think if the stores are selling it, than it must be time to plant it. But hold on just a moment! Costco may be selling swimsuits in February, but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to put up the slip n’ slide when there are a few inches of snow on the ground. Stores just like to be ahead of the game in order to get you to buy their product before you see someone else’s. It’s all a marketing ploy! Don’t let your garden succumb to it.
Length of your growing season
Figure out your estimated last Frost date and your first estimated fall frost. Figure out the number of days between these two dates and you have the length of your growing season. There are lots of handy we sites online that will calculate these for you. Knowing the length of your growing season can help you decide what varieties to grow in your garden.
Take a look at the varieties your interested in growing and note the “days to maturity”. This will be the number of days required from the time you plant the seed or put a start in the ground for the plant to start producing fruit. Now, keep in mind, “start” producing fruit is the key here. Most plants won’t give you their whole harvest in one day or even one week. You’ll want a buffer of time between the required days to maturity and your estimated first fall frost.
For example, in Spokane our growing season is about 158 days long. But it can be hard to get crops whose days to maturity are around 110-120 to actually produce a reasonable harvest. If you’re local, shoot for a days to maturity no longer than 90-100 days (less if your a bit further North). 70-80 days is just about optimal for our area. Note that a lot of garden centers will talk about growing zone, but that has very little bearing on anything you’ll be growing in a summer vegetable garden. You only need to worry about your growing zone if your picking perennials for your flower garden.
Putting your garden plan together
Now you know the what, where, and when for planning your garden. As far as “how” goes, well that depends on your organizational nature and how much time and effort you want to put in. Keeping a good record is helpful because you can consult your notes in future years to see what you grew and where you planted it. That can be something as simple as a composition notebook listing your varieties and a sheet of graph paper with a drawing of your garden sectioned off for where you planted different crops. If you want something more techy, take there are a few good apps that can help (the best one I’ve found is called Planter).
A Garden Scrapbook
One more elaborate method I enjoy, but realistically do not have time for this year, is more of a garden “scrapbook”. I go through my seed catalogs and find the listings for the specific varieties of plants I’m growing and cut out the picture and description and paste it in my notebook. Then I make notes beside the pictures as the season progresses, things like: seed starting date, transplant date, plant yield, flavor of the fruit, will I grow it again? Etc. My garden journals become a valuable reference guide in following years in helping to plan my garden. I can see what did well where and what varieties I might want to pass on.
So get out a notebook and a pile of seed catalogs…or maybe just one if a pile is overwhelming and get planning. My very favorite seed company is Victory Seeds. You can take a look at what they have to offer here. Some other great companies are Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek. Your local grocery or farm store is also likely to have a pretty good selection. Be sure to check the backs of the seed packet for helpful information such as days to maturity and space requirements. Stay tuned for our next article on deciding when to plant.
