Planning The Perfect Garden

While the contents of my refrigerator and compost pile are still fresh in my mind, (I’ll spare you the pics of that) I thought it was a good time to post about garden planning. This is a variation of the usual Plant-What-You-Eat recommendations, but goes more in depth than I’ve seen other places and will help head off some mid-season surprises. The first set of questions will generate a HUGE list of possible plants to grow, while the second set will help you narrow it down to what is best for your situation.

Here are how my veggie answers came out:

• We eat lots of tomatoes: fresh and canned only. (I’d like to be one of those sun-dried tomato people like TL, but I’m not. I’ve had bags older than some of my kids.)
• My husband tolerates them, but the kids really like green beans for snacking: frozen or raw.
• The kids like carrots for lunches. Fresh only. Any canned or frozen carrots in my home will collect social security before it occurs to me to use them.
• Most of our peppers, onions, cauliflower, and turnips are used in soup, stir-fry, etc so blanched/frozen is fine. But the kids do like a few for lunches once in a while.
• If scallions are in the garden, they don’t even get a chance to mature before they’re gone.
• There’s not enough frozen edamame in the world to supply our snacking, but we rarely eat the un-shelled beans IN things and never canned. However, we eat tofu almost every day.
• The kids like sliced cucumbers in school lunches a couple of times a week, but they’re the only ones who end up eating them fresh. We eat about a jar of pickles a month.
  
• We eat lots of zucchini and spaghetti squash. Both cooked, every week. So, frozen is fine…though I’m not too sure about frozen spaghetti squash. Can you do that?
• We use kale and collards, but not chard. And it all ends up steamed or blanched eventually so frozen is really convenient.
• We eat the mess out of some cabbage and broccoli. My kids love it raw, and I have one or two salads that use it, but it most often ends up cooked in something else.
• We eat our weight in organic pb.
• All okra, beets, lettuce, radishes, squash (yellow and winter), and potatoes, rots in the fridge or languishes in the freezer/pantry. I like them. But, apparently, I don’t like to cook them.

Okay, that’s enough info to bore you to tears, so we’ll skip the the FRUIT and HERB answers, and just see what veggies this tells us I could plant and how:

My home would use continuous supply of fresh:
tomatoes
scallions
cabbage
broccoli
just a few carrots
just a few bell peppers
just a few cukes

My home would use an ‘all at once for preserving’ harvest of:
tomatoes (canning and freezing)
turnips (freezing)
cucumbers (pickled)
cauliflower (freezing)
green beans (freezing)
soy beans (freezing and dried)
kale and collards (freezing)
peanuts (canning)
bell peppers (freezing)
zucchini (freezing)
spaghetti squash (cold storage? freezing?)
onions (freezing)

My answers: I prefer organic foods, but am willing to compromise onions if I need to. Almost any fresh/frozen organic produce is cheaper to grow than buy. However, canned organic can be pretty reasonable. Also, since I’m using a limited number of raised beds, I probably couldn’t grow enough peanuts and soybeans (for tofu) to matter. SO…..I’ll adjust my lists accordingly.

I think I’ll grow a continuous harvest of fresh:
tomatoes
carrots
scallions
cabbage
broccoli
a few bell peppers
a few cukes

I’d like to grow a preserving harvest of:
tomatoes (canning or freezing)
turnips (freezing)
cucumbers (canning)
green beans (freezing)
soy beans (freezing and experiment with drying)
kale and/or collards (freezing)
bell peppers (freezing)
zucchini (freezing)
spaghetti squash (cold storage? freezing?)

I’ve found that when I plant things I HOPE we’ll use, I not only have excesses of things I don’t need (=fridge rot), but I have a HUGE failure rates in the crops I don’t routinely cook. I don’t find myself watching the backyard waiting for them–and organic gardening requires a certain level of hovering. Neglect=BUG EATEN DEAD PLANTS.

So, hopefully, thinking about your harvest this way will help you have what you want, when and how you want it.

Ivory