It is 2023, and the pandemic is still having an impact on our lives. Three years have passed since it first began. It appears to be taking forever. To the best of our abilities, we are managing, moving on in life, and making things happen. It turns out that, for a lot of us, our gardens have served as wonderful stress relievers and havens of tranquility. Throughout the dark days of the epidemic, they gave us nourishment, beauty, and a reason to live, and I for one, am extremely thankful that I had my gardens to take care of.
For those of us residing above the 40th parallel, January is a great time to start planning for the spring planting season. Our mail boxes are getting swamped with seed catalogs, which are fun to browse through and determine which new plants we will grow.
Garden Planning
My allotment plot is not very large. It is 14 ft. by 12 ft. So it takes some planning to fit all the vegetables I want to grow into the space. A priority for me is tomatoes. I like to can them so I can use them year round in a variety of recipes, especially sauces. An important consideration is crop rotation. If you grow the same plant in the same location year after year, a couple of things happen: the soil nutrients utilized by that specific plant get depleted, and the specific viruses that attack that plant get concentrated. Rotating plants or / plant families to different locations in your garden each year, minimizes disease outbreaks. Below are the major plant families:
- Alliums: Onions, shallots, leeks, and garlic
- Legumes: Green beans, green peas, southern peas, peanuts, and soybeans All legumes are soil “fixers” and share the benefit of adding nitrogen back to the soil.
- Brassicas: Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, turnip greens, radishes, collards, Chinese cabbage, mustard greens, and collards. Share pest issues and often need to be netted to block cabbage moths. Need nitrogen-rich soil. Plant after the legume (bean) family.
- Nightshades: Tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and potatoes. All heavy feeders need rich soil, and are affected by many of the same diseases. Never plant tomatoes after potatoes.
- Umbellifers: Carrots, parsnips, fennel, parsley, and dill.
- Cucurbits: Zucchini and summer squash; cukes, pumpkins and winter squash, melons (watermelon, cantaloupe), and gourds. All heavy feeders grow best in rich soil.
Below is the plan I created for this year’s garden.
