The Great Garden Plan: 2016

I don't know how interesting you find posts like these, but dreaming about the things i'm going to grow is one of my favorite parts of spring. As always, i'm starting out the year with a few specific goals. It helps me to improve my gardening abilities every year, and to narrow down my list of ideas until it's actually feasible.

My main goals are to start a couple breeding projects, grow as many tea herbs as possible, grow enough tomato sauce for the year, and to save more seeds at the end of the season. I would also like to try out having a ground cover, and try out some hot sauce recipes and salads from the garden.

I am blessed to have two gardening plots this year, both with a lot of potential.

One is in the 4th East Community Garden. My spot looks like it has quite a bit of shade, which will definitely shape what I can do with the space. There also happens to be quite a few raspberry suckers trying to come up, but they're easy to break off right now so as long as I can mulch deeply and check the space every few days they shouldn't be too much of a nuisance. I also already has tulips and strawberries. Both of which make me super happy.

I volunteered to be one of the compost stewards* for the garden. I'm more excited about this than a person reasonably should be. I have high hopes of gathering free materials from local sources and pumping out a yard of compost a week for the garden, or for sale. I'm also hoping to get chickens for the garden to do this. Although that would require a bit of upfront cost, and I don't know how likely it is. I'm also overly tempted to buy myself this compost turning tool, because I am a small person and shoveling things is hard. However I have resolved to at least wait until I've turned a pile three or four times.

In this garden I'm hoping to grow several different kinds of melons. I was seriously disappointed in the miniature melon from last year. It had a taste reminiscent of wet cardboard, and the "tropical scent" smelled mostly like an over ripe tomato. So I've decided to breed my own. My hope is to come up with a single serving melon with a delicious inside and a particularly unique and interesting outside. I'm going to start with a cross of Rich Sweetness 132 and a delicious green cantaloupe I found at the farmers market last year. The Cantaloupe is probably crossed up, so there's sure to be a lot of variation that I can select from. I'm also growing a few Prescott Fond Blanc Melon plants which I got in a trade. It seems amazingly weird. In the next few years I'll back cross my hybrid with the selections of the green cantaloupe in order to get as close to the taste as possible. After that I'll select for taste, size, vigor, and disease resistance.

I'm also going to plant as many sunflowers as possible. I'll select for sturdiness as a possible trellis system for heavy things like tomatoes. I'll also be looking for those mutated blooms in my sunflowers again, but they are definitely of lesser importance to me. My plans might not be possible,. In fact I get a weird look whenever I mention the idea to any other gardener. The nice thing is that I can follow a crazy idea for as long as I want. I don't have to think inside a box in order to get a grant or permission, like a professional plant breeder would. I can just have fun.

I'm also going to try out one or two varieties of cherry tomato and some cut and come again lettuce. I'm planning on trying to like tomatoes this year, and cherry tomatoes seem like a good place to start. A few hot pepper plants will also be tucked in wherever they fit here.

The second space I actually found first through yard share. It's a bit smaller but has nice sun and an amazing trellis. This is where I will grow paste tomatoes, tea herbs, and where I'll try out the clover ground cover. Unfortunately the tomato seed I started several weeks ago hasn't come up. I'm not sure if something went wrong while saving the seed, or while planting. It's kind of disappointing, but I'll try again next year. In the meantime I think I"ll try a few varieties with long pointed fruits. Mainly because I think those look the neatest.

So there you have it. An ambitious and slightly silly plan for what I'm going to do with my garden space this year.

What are your plans?