Well, with the New Year approaching and the next couple of months bring hibernation. Now is the best time to plan your 2013 gardens. Planning your vegetable gardens in advance is so important for many reasons. Planning is very cost effective. When I first started growing vegetables I would look through the seed catalogs and get drawn into a frenzy of excitement with all the varieties and gorgeous pictures of perfect ripe veggies. I would order enough seed to plant 10 acres of a hundred different veggies when in reality I had one acre to work with and knowledge of about five vegetables. Having a realistic  plan of your available growing space is the first place to begin. Measure the perimeter of your entire growing space. Whether you plan to grow in row crops or in raised beds, knowing the total amount of space you have to work with is important. 

Next thing is to find a good garden planner tool. Now I have a friend who still uses the good old reliable notebook and pencil method. He simply draws a pencil drawing of his space, writes the measurements along the edges of the page and lays out in rows what he is planting in which location. He then keeps his notebooks from year to year for reference and remembrance of what worked and what didn't.

My garden planner tool is online. I have tried quite a few of the online planners and I have a reliable favorite that starts with a 30 day free trial and then has a $25 annual fee. It is wonderful and worth every penny of the fee.

You can find this planner at Grow Veg Garden Planner   

This planner will help you grow fruits and vegetables to the best of their ability, whatever the size or shape of your garden or plot.

With GrowVeg.com it is easy to draw out your garden plan and decide how best to plant it. The GrowVeg.com Garden Planner software shows how much space plants require and how to group them for maximum success, removing the need to look up planting distances and crop families.

Growing advice is just one click away as you select the plants that you wish to include, enabling you to solve problems and maximize your harvest from the space you have.

This planner has everything you need to be thorough and organized about your garden design. When growing vegetables there are many factors to consider to ensure success and an abundant harvest. Spacing, companion planting, crop rotation, each plant has it's own special needs and this planner helps you keep everyone in the garden happy. But, I think my favorite thing about this planner is that it has such a huge selection of vegetable types and then it has a drop down menu with variety names of the particular vegetable you have placed in your plan. For example, I have four raised beds just for my asparagus crop and in those four beds I have two different varieties, the same for my strawberry beds. Well, after I created my four asparagus beds in the plan, I could click on the asparagus image in my bed and a drop down menu appears with different varieties of Gus to choose from. I pick my variety and now my plan shows me which variety is planted in which bed. For those of us who grow a great deal of veggies over many years this is a great benefit for memory sake.  This plan also chooses the plants that are best for you according to your zone, because when you first set up your account it asks you your zip code and finds your hardiness zone for you. Awesome! I love this garden planner, it is not only smart and useful but it is fun and colorful making it appealing to use.   

There are many vegetables that cannot be planted where another particular vegetable has grown previously, so keeping a good plan of your gardens makes it easy to know who grew where and who can follow them in that particular bed or location of your garden. This is known as crop rotation. Planting certain veggies in the same place consecutively can cause diseases in your plants. It can also cause low production in harvest. For example, when you grow tomatoes in a bed, they are depleting the soil of the nutrients they need to grow. If you replant tomatoes in the same location there will not be enough nutritional value for them in that spot. But another crop, say green beans will do great there because they have different needs from the soil as well as adding nitrogen back into the soil. Crop rotation is an important factor in growing veggies especially if you live in an area where you have a long growing season. Here in Massachusetts I can grow two to three different plantings of green beans over a growing season, so I move those plantings around and put them in beds where say, broccoli had grown in early Spring, or my lettuce and spinach bed.   

Another benefit of planning before planting is growing realistically. As I mentioned before it is easy to get so excited at the prospect of growing every veggie known to man, but we must be realistic about space, our true likes and dislikes, "am I going to eat this veggie?" And how much of a particular vegetable do you consume. Our first couple of years growing I planted everything! I discovered we could grow great white turnips, they grew like weeds for us. But how many turnips can you eat in a year? And we also discovered we didn't know many people who liked turnips, so we ended up growing a crop that mostly went into compost. This is a tremendous waste of time and growing space. Now if your talking about beets, well, that is another story! Don and I could grow a full acre of beets and stand there looking at them all, then look at one another and say, "Gee, do you think that's enough till next year?" We can never grow too many beets, we love them! So I keep a good amount of growing space just for these burgundy beauties. Knowing what you like and what you'll consume or be able to give to others and what grows well in your area, are all realistic considerations when planning your gardens.   

When Don I lived in North Carolina and farmed, we could easily grow, leeks, and varieties of Winter squash that required 100+ days to come to harvest. Here in Massachusetts I have to consider varieties that require much shorter growing days because we do not have enough warm days for vegetables that take a long time to grow.  

All of these factors may seem overwhelming or just too much to think about to make it worth while growing your own vegetables. But trust me a week or so of dedicated planning and thought will make creating a bountiful vegetable garden a piece of carrot cake! I personally get a great deal of pleasure and relaxation in sitting down with my lap top and seed catalogs in hand, a steaming hot cup of coffee next to me and a window in front of me that I can look out and see clouds and snow covering my beds while planning and dreaming of next Springs gardens.  

A little planning now and this is what you can have in a few months.

Happy Planning!!!

For more great gardening articles and tips please visit our blog at http://itzybitzyfarm.blogspot.com/

And visit our web site at www.itzybitzyfarm.com 

My first garden was the direct result of an epiphany. What happened was this.

A few years ago the state of the economy – banks crashing, corporations folding and 401K values plummeting – had us more than a little concerned. That, coupled with the possibility of continued unseasonable and unpredictable weather, started us on a program of home emergency preparedness. We already owned a wood burning stove, and we bought a couple cords of wood.
Recalling our four days without power after Hurricane Isabel, we invested in a generator. After a number of devastating storms beginning with Katrina, FEMA and The Red Cross were advising people to have anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks of food on hand at home at all times. So we began to research what was involved in a long term food storage program. We began to stock our cellar with canned goods and water, with grains and beans in 5 gallon buckets. And then one day, in the midst of all the frenetic and uneasy hoarding, I was standing in my cellar, looking at my number ten cans full of freeze-dried food, and I realized that we were going about this all wrong.

Real abundance lies not in accumulation but in replenishment.

So near the end of that June, pretty much as an afterthought, I planted a small garden. Using a shovel, I turned over a rectangle of grass, about 80 square feet, right in the sunny middle of our back yard. I got four tomato plants from a big box store that I thought were Roma tomatoes but which turned out to be something more like oval-shaped cherry tomatoes. They grew to be only about thigh high, and produced pretty well all summer. I had an eggplant but it didn’t make it. I had a Black Beauty zucchini from which I harvested a few baseball-bat-sized fruits before the vine borers got it. I had a small melon patch that produced quite well, and a few pumpkin plants that never amounted to much. I grew a gigantic and gangly okra plant that I could not keep up with harvesting. That was pretty much it.

But I was hooked.

Every year after that saw an increase in the size of our garden, and in the diversity of crops, much of which has been chronicled here on Grit. And boy have I learned a few things along the way – one of which is that a vegetable garden can become an obsession. Like a great romance, it contains elements of both inevitability and insurmountable odds. Like a great love, one’s garden is both familiar and constantly surprising.

I’ve recently put together a slim volume of my experiences called Confessions of a Vegetable Lover which is available as a print or an e-book at Amazon, Smashwords and B&N.com. For the month of July only, you can get the e-book for free at Smashwords if you use the coupon code SSWIN at checkout. I am also currently hosting a giveaway for this book at GoodReads. Three free print copies are up for grabs. If you’d like to sign up for the chance to win a free copy, you can do that here. (Log in and scroll down the list of giveaways until you find the book!) If you are not already a member of GoodReads, all you need to join is an e-mail address. The giveaway closes on 10 July.

My first novel, Big Work, is also available in print and e-book at Amazon, Smashwords and B&N.com. At Smashwords, you can use the Coupon Code SSW50 at checkout to get 50% off of the e-book (regularly priced $2.99) for the month of July only!

Spring is a time for fresh beginnings and new life. We have a few little sprouts around our homestead. 

We really enjoy gardening, growing flowers, veggies, and fruit. This is the third summer since we moved here full time. The first year we concentrated on finishing our house while we lived in a trailer. Last summer we planted some fruit trees, built a large raised planting bed, and put in a small garden. 

This year, we're expanding...just a bit. 

The tomato plants we started in a storage closet are looking great! Well, maybe we got a little carried away with varieties. We like to have all sizes and types of tomatoes: some for sauce and paste, some big slicers for hamburgers and sandwiches, and some medium salad-size. And of course we love the teeny ones, so we have currant and cherry tomatoes. A friend suggested using purple tomatoes to deepen the color of sauce and paste, so we have a couple of those too.

Sweet and hot peppers and some other assorted plants are smaller but getting a good start. It will be a few more weeks before we can safely plant them outdoors without shelter. If you’re thinking about starting some seeds for summer planting, here are descriptions of how our daughter made her similar simple and inexpensive system: the shelf and light setup and the heat mats made of Christmas lights and rope lights.  It's a big improvement over last year's windowsill operation.

Our orchard is taking shape! Unfortunately, due to deer, gophers, frolicking dogs, and some planting errors, we lost several of the fruit trees we put in last year. We replaced some of the trees this month and are watching some other weak ones that are—amazingly--sprouting new buds. Some of them I was sure were lost for good…but they have heart! This little guy is giving it all he has.The damaged trees that recover will just be a few years behind the others when it’s time to bear fruit.

We took a country drive to a local vineyard to buy grape, raspberry, and blackberry plants. Here are the raspberries and blackberries; several types of table and wine grapes are planted next to them. We’ll also plant blueberries and gooseberries. Strawberries are growing in a raised bed in the garden area. Is there anything like a juicy berry, warmed just right by the sun? Mmm!

What’s sprouting at your place?