Winter Garden Planning: Get Seeds in Time

Now is the time to begin planning your garden for this summer. I know it may seem a little early, but you never can be too early in the planning stage. Planning a garden requires that you have a concept, a design and compatible plants.

Concept:

There are a lot of garden concepts. I will give a short list of the different ones around which to plan your garden and then go into to depth in later articles.

Survivalist garden and vegetable garden are very similar. A survivalist garden will contain more vegetables that will keep the winter through. When I was younger and in college, we lived in the country with five glorious acres. We kept three acres natural, meaning we didn't mow, had an acre of garden, and scattered throughout the area and around the garden perimeter were fruit trees. We bought the property with the trees and didn't plant them, so they were already bearing fruit. Our garden fed us the entire winter. We composted, raised loofa sponge plants, and at the end of the season brought plants in to provide fresh herbs and bush tomatoes all winter. (The tomatoes needed to be planted late in the season for this to work.) This garden was more than a vegetable garden. It was a survivalist garden. Last summer I found containers of tomato plants on sale for a quarter at the tail end of planting season. This was not even a real garden...but it was dirt-cheap tomatoes all summer.

A gift garden is planned around gifts for next Christmas. If you have a special pickle recipe that you would like to give the following year then by all means grow those cucumbers. What about herbal gifts or vinegars for others? You can grow your own sponges and make loofa soap as gifts. Here is a link to one of the article that I wrote on gifts from the garden.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/431040/growing_christmas_gifts_in_the_garden.html

An herb garden is a wonderful idea. It can supply you with hummingbirds and bumbly bees as well as delightfully beautiful herbs. If you have a small area or no yard, you can container garden.

A flower garden can be one of two kinds. You can grow the flowers for cutting and decorating the home, or simply allow the whole neighborhood to enjoy them. You can combine the flower garden with a vegetable garden to not only maximize space, but also do a bit of companion planting.

If you are planting flowers you also need to decide whether you will want them annuals or perennials. The biggest difference, aside from annual replanting, is the length of time that you have blooms. Annuals give maximum flowers all summer long. Perennials will have a specific time that they bloom and then the peter out, leaving sticks and foliage. Perennial gardens need to have a lot more thought into the type of flower and the blooming season.

Design:

Your garden design can be intricate as ours was one year, or just straight rows. If you have limited space you can layer the garden with several raised layers to maximize the planting area.

Two years ago I drew up a sunburst in a square and we planted vegetables and flowers together to create the image. The center of the sun had our sprinkler. It was an almost pest free garden because of the companion planting.

You can have barrel gardens, border gardens; English cottage gardens (Throw the seeds into the wind and hope they grow) patch gardens and very formal gardens. Get a little creative with your design. Be ready to use hay, mulch, straw or plastic to keep down the weeds if your design is intricate because tilling is really tough.

Compatible plants:

Make sure that your plants can be pals. Basil loves tomatoes but hates rue. Starting to sound like table charts for the family get together. A lot of plants really don't like rue, so it is a tough one to place. (Uncle Zeke?) Tomatoes don't like fennel or potatoes.

Some plants love each other way too much and cross-pollinate. If you are planning on saving any seeds for the next year never put melons beside squash. Those nasty indiscriminate plants will cross-pollinate right in broad daylight, and you won't know it happened until the babies arrive the following year. Then you have a real oddity on your hands.

Take the time today before the seed catalogue and seed sites entice you to buy two of everything. You can grow your plants relatively inexpensively in your home. I have yet to figure out how to keep the cat away. Fat boy, Jessee is a meat and potato cat (Yogurt and ice cream too!) but Rocky loves those veggies. We got him a Kitty garden for Christmas and he nibbles delightedly. Jess would consider the extra dirt a second bathroom. Once this is solved, we'll set up the grow lights (use a grow bulb and cheap shop lights) and start a survival garden that is layered. How about you? It is time to prepare for the summer.