Next year when I garden...
At this time of year, I tend to look around at my yard and ponder what I will do differently (and what I will do the same). Tell me I'm not the only one!
Next year, I will plant purple hyacinths around my mailbox because that works out fabulously every single year.
I will not let those healthy-looking squash vines (that sprout from seeds in the compost ) take over my gardening space. They are all promise, with their big leaves and deep yellow flowers, but the flowers never produce anything because the seeds are apparently from a hybrid vegetable.
I will plant more hyacinths around the swingset and on my deck.
I will remember to water the flowers in my shed's windowbox.
I will plant two tomatoes plants in the corner of my yard instead of just one, because I've discovered that the plant will grow up through the wire fencing, thus eliminating the need for tomato stakes.
I will grow basil again because it's super easy and because fresh basil is super tasty.
I will start my tomato plants earlier and work a little harder at digging up and enriching the soil around them so that they will produce more.
I will let my kids plant more of their own seeds because Joshua's thrill over eating his own carrot and Lisey's joy at seeing her forget-me-nots bloom is just too good.
I also have big plans to actually plant the flower seeds that I bought...I know I have an unopened package of zinnia flowers (which should still be good next spring) and I think they'd be beautiful in my little bed by the shed door.
Ooh, and I'm also going to plant more spinach next spring. I tried that for the first time this year and it did really well in my backyard.
What about you? Do you tend to have grand garden aspirations in the fall?
Today's 365 post: She doesn't usually take naps
I am in the lucky position of having two springs this year as we have moved to the other side of the world so I don't have to wait to put my autumn plans into practise! I have planted basil, parsley, coriander and chillies in pots as we always use loads of all of these. I am also planning a day of 'raised bed making' next weekend where we will make some boxes from scrap wood and plant some tomatoes and strawberries. We will be moving this year (for the fourth time in a year *sigh*) so I don't want to put anything in the ground that we can't take with us!
I am the same way! In fact I am having plans running thru my head all year! I started a journal so I can remember when it's actually time to plant! On your recommendation I bought some hyacinths to plant this spring! I'm so stoked!! Thanks!!!
Yes! I always miss the hot weather in the fall and I daydream about gardening again. Next year, my garden will be much smaller. We went crazy and planted a huge garden that was next-to-impossible to maintain. The biggest problem that I have is with eggplants though. Every year I plant them, and every year they die. It would be nice to solve my eggplant problem next year.
Like you, better at watering my plants that are in the back yard. Shoot better at watering all of them.. We had such a hot humid summer, you just couldn't keep up with the watering!
Maybe next year my strawberries will produce! (yummm my grandma makes the best strawberry jam) And I will get more then one tomato off my plant!
I'm so excited for next summer's gardening...because for the first time I will have a yard to garden in! We just bought a house and I've already picked out a corner of the yard to be my garden. So I have BIG plans for next year's garden! I'm going to try lettuce and broccoli, for starters. Tomatoes never seem to work for me, and since I'm in the Pacific Northwest I'm not sure there's enough sun for them, so I may give my tomato attempts a year off. I'd also like to plant a bunch of zucchini and cucumbers because I did both on a patio garden and neither took off very well; not enough plants to produce fruit.
I dream about my garden every single month that it isn't growing 🙂
And you need to find a recipe to cook those deep yellow squash flowers... they are the most delicious things ever! In fact, I pick all the flowers off my squash plants to make fritters, and never get any squash at all... and my family is completely happy. Try it next year!
Yep, I'm another one who's always making grand plans for next year's garden in the fall. I'm going to relocate my strawberry patch in the spring to give my raspberry canes more space to expand (they were growing like crazy this season). I learned a few things about staggering my plantings this year so I'll do it a bit differently next year to maximize my yield of green beans and cool weather greens. Gardening is such an ongoing learning process - I imagine I'll always be aiming to do something slightly different next year!
I have plans for a vegetable patch too. Not much, just some favorites, things like zucchini, pumpkin and peas and perhaps a couple of tomato plants. The tomatoes will go into big pots on wheels so I can move them around to the sun. Hey, you can plant a fall crop of spinach this year, as well as lettuce and radish.
I am absolutely cracking up because I have spent this rainy drizzly cool morning sipping coffee and lamenting over my garden, lol. Let's see, next year for us will be more spinach, more lettuce, more jalepenos and more tomatoes. Definitely less beans. Pledge to water flowers in the hanging basket on the porch. And will actually learn how to care for my berry bushes.
I read in Square Foot Gardening that if you put your seeds in the refridgerator they will last up to 10 years!
Fall is the perfect time to think of next year's garden. Spring blooming bulbs don't just plant themselves, you know. I often scatter seeds about in autumn and cover them up with leaves so they'll be ready to sprout and come out after the snow is all gone and spring starts. I love getting surprised and I will, because I usually forget what I planted in autumn! 😉
I am jealous that you can grow flowers. I can grow garden plants no problem, but I kill any flower I try to grow (including the ones in the garden to deter pests! LOL!). Sadly I have had to creatively incorporate veggies into my flower beds, so that it looks like landscaping(from a distance at least). Fruit bushes and strawberry plants really are pretty if you look at them, and I love the feathery tops on carrots. Bonus is that I can produce quite a bit of garden produce in my average size yard this way.
After several unsuccessful attempts each year, I finally succeeded with a few tomatoes and green peppers in pots this summer. I got inspiration from a friend who enjoys gardening. She started her tomato plants back in late February with seeds. I started in late April with sprouted plants purchased from a local garden center. My goal for next year is to grow something from scratch- aka- seeds.
No, you're not the only one. I've been reviewing our successes and failures. We've had dozens of tomatoes, a good crop of strawberries and a succession of salads. However our courgettes and squashes were a dismal failure. The freestanding greenhouse was a winner enabling us to bring on our seedlings and provide shelter for some of our taller tomato plants. So much so that I'm going to buy a second smaller one to expand our salad and herb range. However, most important of all, I need to keep my eye on the ball and not allow myself to be distracted. Life has a habit of getting in the way, but even a few minutes a day can make all the difference.
Here's to next year!
This year the basil absolutely took over my small raised bed garden. Determined to take control of my raised bed garden I fully intended to pull a lot of the basil and use the space for other plants....Welll...when I got out there, the basil was just full of these small working bees.....What's a girl to do? I couldn't just pull up all that basil when those sweet bees were working it. I just watered the basil patch and purchased veggies....Somewhere there is basil honey.
I've learned, or rather re-learned, a few things about gardening the past few years. We moved from the north, where any seed thrown into the ground would produce abundantly, to the south, where almost every crop is a challenge. In my southern climate I learned that tomatoes do not produce after July (at least in my garden). Planting cold crops must begin in January or February, not March. My greatest success (took over the entire garden) this year was sweet potatoes. Think I'll try them again. I need to continually build up the soil (composting is definitely in), and water, water, water. Think I'll invest in some more watering equipment. That rain barrel we purchased will be up and running next spring.
working full time has put a damper on my garden. tomatoes were not tasty, a gopher ate my pumpkin plant and the zucchini is struggling, but i'm holding out hope. our summer weather around the sf bay area has just begun...
next year i will water and fertilize more diligently and i'm going to start composting, thanks to your very simple method. (it has had me scared of ending up with a sinky, slimy mess up till now.) thanks, kristin!
Kristen, you may be able to squeeze in a fall crop of spinach, if you've still got some seeds lying around. Spinach survives light frosts, especially if you can cover the bed with an old sheet. Last year, in central New Hampshire, we were sharing lettuce and spinach into November using this method - I'm guessing your growing season is substantially longer than ours!
My grand plans for the garden include a pear tree and grape arbor. Less grand plans include planting garlic this fall and onions next spring.
I was just out in our garden this morning and discovered another volunteer pumpkin (from seeds in the compost). That makes 7 (cooking) pumpkins this year! I'm glad I got something from them because they overtook almost the entire garden, and for awhile I thought we would just have a lot of vines and flowers, but no squash or pumpkins. Yeah!
This year's garden was a disappointment. Zucchini and tomatoes have been great, and we had a lovely lettuce crop, but everything else produced poorly, probably because we had a long, cold spring and early summer was cold and wet as well. I can't even begin to think about a garden next year; we're still trying to get through all the tomatoes from this year. We also don't know if we'll be in this house or not next summer. A garden might make the house more attractive to buyers though!
Every year I tell myself that I'm going to have a garden next year, and then spring hits and I'm not ready and by the time I have a plan it's too late. I long to grow our own food. I would be so proud! I also live in a town home with a very small yard which makes it hard. Some day though....
Can you eat squash flowers and leaves? You can with pumpkin so maybe you can with squash???
I want to plant tomotoes, limes and dragon fruit. A work colleague has a dragon fruit and it has produced 20 fruit this year alone!!!! Yum!!!
I need to get some of those Hyacinths and try them. I just hope that they can handle heat! Lord knows that I need to plant seeveral things to make my yard look less barren and sad.
Like you, I'm going to be better at watering next year. Still, I am amazed at how well my garden did for the first time! Next year, I will also plant different varieties of tomatoes - including Romas. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks these thoughts when the growing season is over!
This coming year will be my first to have a garden. I have high hopes, but I'm a little bit wary because it will be a container garden on my balcony of my third floor apartment. I bought a lot of large-ish containers for just $0.25 each (yay craigslist!), but I've never grown anything except flowers in pots before (anything that has lived, anyway).
Next year I am wanting to plant what we eat a lot of--tomatoes (mostly in sauces), spinach, broccoli, carrots, maybe onions.... You can read more about my money-saving gardening plans at my blog, http://thesimplehearth.blogspot.com/2010/09/daydreaming-of-spring-already.html, but the short of it is that I am hoping to have really healthy, organic (or close to it) veggies without the organic sticker price.
Good post, Kristen, it's good to know I'm not the only one thinking about Spring already! 🙂
Oh I love this. I can't wait for the day when I get to have a garden of my own. Right now we live in an apartment completely shrouded in shade and no balcony. I've tried various houseplants to no avail!
My future garden plans aren't quite as pleasant as most of yours.
While I've never needed it before and will probably not need it again, I either have to create some drainage or move my garden. Because of all the rain we got this year that we don't normally get, my garden that is strategically placed to catch water, has barely dried out enough to be healthy. Guess I'll be good to just get it going again next year.
I don't have a green thumb but I'm working on that. Planted, that is my husband planted for me, tomato plants, flat-leaf parsley, thyme, oregano, and basil. Basil, eaten by something, didn't do well while the parsley took off. Still getting tomatoes from the two plants and there are more green ones on the stems. My husband fishes and he put in fish heads in my little patch of garden. Thinking that the tomatoes and the parsley loved that!
I know what you mean! I've been doing our garden for 4 years now, and I always try to make the next year's garden better. I also thought you might want to try planting spinach this fall. You can start planting it now according to my gardening sheet. Enjoy!
Ooh, good to know! I have some spinach seeds here that I can use. Sweet.
hehe...we are actually getting ready to start the garden now in south Florida 🙂 I am using my amazon g/c (from swagbucks and fedex rewards) to get myself an earthbox this year. Tomato plants are hard for me for some reason so I'm trying it in an earthbox this year. Lettuce in the green wheelbarrow thing again. Basil, etc., in the ground as the containers get dried out way too quick and die off (but I HATE the dirt on the underside of the leaves which is WHY I like the container...) The jalepeno plant is still spitting out the HOT peppers one year later ... keep wanting to rip it out and then when I go to do it there are flowers & peppers ready to be picked ... amazing!
The pumpkin plants that grew from seed in my compost actually were producing little pumpkins until some nasty buggies got in there & infested 🙁 Amazing plants which illustrated how wonderful compost really is to grow things with.
Next year I'd like to get ahold of the seeds you use for those pretty flowers that grow up around your deck & mailbox. There was a post not long ago about them 🙂
As always, my plans for more roses in my garden has me wondering how to incorporate yet another planting bed into the yard. I've seen lots of new climbers that I'd like to try, but I've run out of arbors/trellises to grow them on. Maybe a fence......... If anyone grows roses, or has attempted to grow them with no luck, take a look at this easy organic way to care for them, that makes things alot easier. visit: http://www.allaboutrosegardening.com/Spray-Guide-for-Roses.html