Garden planning: the "good parts" version.

Lewisburg.

'Tis the season for very little gardening, but lots of planning. The first package of seeds (along with some other useful odds and ends) is due to arrive from Johnny's today, and the bulk of the rest from Seed Savers not long after. This step, of course, comes after the spreadsheet-based mania that I use as the main planning process. Steve, you asked for it; here's how I'm planning the 2009 gardening season.

I'm amazed that I find it as interesting as I do. After all, I haven't often (ever?) though of playing with spreadsheets to be especially fun. At the moment, I'm wrestling with how I can put the gist of it up here without making my eyes glaze over with boredom, let alone anyone else's. At this point, I'm going to take a cue from William Goldman¹ and just run with the "good parts" version. In brief, it goes something like this:

1) The days grow short in November and December, and the ground starts freezing over. With any luck, I take this as a sign to let the garden rest, and I've had the foresight to harvest everything that's harvestable.² Exciting discovery from 2008: the Brussels sprouts can nearly freeze solid and still cook up beautifully. Also: when the planters on the deck freeze solid, the cold-hardy plants in them will wilt. Bring them inside, though, and they come back to life.

2) In mid-December, the new catalogs arrive. They're all possibility and no effort; with pretty pictures and enticing descriptions, they make the argument that there isn't a bad choice among them. Examples that I've selected for my garden:

• Listada de Gandia (Eggplant): Beautiful purple striped eggplant. After selecting for over 5 years, this is the best strain out of 10 for consistent deep color and earliness. We can say with certainty that this is the best strain available on the market. Reliable, heavy yields of excellent quality, 6-8" thin skinned fruits.
  
  
• Noir des Carmes (Melon): One of the easiest to grow and most luxurious of all melons. Extremely dark green skin, almost black when immature, ripening to mostly orange mottled with green. Sweet, aromatic, orange flesh. Very productive. Sure to be a new family favorite.
  
  
• Hon Tsai Tai (Brassica rapa): Purple flower stems and buds. A Chinese specialty. The young plants soon branch and produce quantities of long, pencil-thin, red-purple, budded flower stems. Pleasing, mild mustard taste for use raw in salads or lightly cooked in stir-fries or soups. For multiple harvesting of tender stems and leaves. Can be spring sown, but yields best when sown June through October for harvest from midsummer through winter (in mild areas).
  
  
• Sun Gold (Tomato): Intense fruity flavor. Exceptionally sweet, bright tangerine-orange cherry tomatoes leave customers begging for more. Vigorous plants start yielding early and bear right through the season. Tendency to split precludes shipping, making these an exclusively fresh-market treat. The taste can’t be beat. Indeterminate.

And so on. I spend a few weeks looking through everything, marking the interesting ones with a red pen. The Listada de Gandia and Sun Golds were successes in 2008, but the others are new experiments. This year brings the new experience of being able to check off vegetables that we're thrilled to be able to grow (and eat) again.

3) Inevitably, there are far too many little red dots. This year, I've limited myself to about forty-five different types of vegetables and herbs; the total number of varieties is a little over one hundred. (Nine types of tomatoes and fifteen kinds of peppers'll do that.)

Figuring out what to grow becomes a back-and-forth process between individual garden bed layouts and the catalogs. There are thirteen beds - fourteen including the planters on the deck³ - in a particular rotation schedule to (in theory) minimize pest and fertility problems. Each is approximately nine by twenty-five feet, separated by bands of untilled lawn and smaller patches with flowers and herbs. Most of these large plots will be devoted to vegetables, except for a few with cover crops. I go through them, one by one, filling in the available space with the varieties that look most interesting, or that worked out last year, and set aside a few pockets for scattering flowers and herbs.



This is the 2009 arrangement of garden beds. It's oddly-shaped because of the edge of the property and the various trees already growing around. The little two-letter markings are a shorthand for coordinating placement in spreadsheet columns; writing "br" instead of "brassicas" means I don't have to scroll left and right as often when typing the details in.

4) The next, deeply exciting step is to try to coordinate multiple plantings to make the most effective use of space. Also to avoid having one massive harvest of, say, lettuce, that we can't possibly eat and can't preserve for later. I'm not especially good at this, though I'm getting better. Fortunately, the garden's productive enough that it can easily feed two people with regular dinner guests for the bulk of the season.

It's also time to make sure that I have enough space at any given time to start seedlings. Since long-season crops are a little hard-pressed to produce in the window between frosts in Pennsylvania, the seeds need a head start beneath a row of fluorescent tubes for a few weeks. Without a greenhouse handy, I'm limited by the size of my table and number of fixtures. (It's plenty.) Any spare space will be used for flowers, so we can have some colorful blooms early in the season.

5) Final step: order seeds. After using the spreadsheet to figure out how many I need - length of row times seed spacing, plus extras for starting transplants; accounting for any seed I have saved from last year - I spend the better part of an afternoon clicking the "add 1 packet" button on the seed company websites.

In brief, that's it. Later I'll probably post something to highlight a few of the interesting varieties I'm trying out this year. After all, for the price of a cup or two of coffee, I can get enough heirloom tomato seeds to make pizza sauce regularly throughout the winter. Or a year's worth of basil for pesto. Or, if all goes well, more watermelon than I know what to do with.

* * * * *

¹Author of The Princess Bride.

²This might change next winter, if I get around to constructing a few cold frames to extend the season.

³For both convenience and deer- and rabbit-proofing. Salad greens, baby carrots, radishes, turnips, peas, and plenty of herbs are all planned for the deck. So are a few small pepper plants that are both ornamental and edible.