Feb 8, 202213 min read

Garden Plans for 2022

The next growing season is approaching quickly and I cannot wait to learn a bunch of new things! This year my goal is to learn how to plant a couple new things, continue to succeed at growing what I know well, learn more about canning and freezing our harvest, and incorporate some farm life to the village! YES! You heard me right; mama is getting CHICKENS!

"The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies"

- Gertrude Jekyll

I miss the sounds of birds chirping and eating bird seed from the feeders on the back deck. Watching the birds fight between one another to see who gets to sit inside the birdcage to eat seed while the others hang from the wire surrounding the outside. I miss quite warm mornings sitting on the back deck with a cup of coffee before I take my morning stroll through the garden. Soaking in the beauty of the sun peeping through the trees. I miss walking through the garden pebbled paths, taking mental notes of how each and every plant is thriving or lack there of. I long for the days where I simply walk with my hot coffee and pull weeds or pluck suckers from the tomato plants. That's my time to ground myself and put my mind in a positive place to start the day. My garden is my happy place; it's my therapy room. Those beautiful quite mornings will look a little different this year. I'll more than likely be carrying a tiny little babe with me while I stroll through the garden and tend to the chickens.

This years gardening experience is going to be one for the books. I already see myself laughing through the majority of planting season, because I will be about 7-8 months pregnant getting our garden beds ready for seeds. It's going to be hilarious to watch, the neighbors will just love the show. Hopefully, it won't be too bad. The beds just need mended, add a bit more soil to the tops layers, give them a good fluff, and the raised boxes will be ready to go. I'll probably need some additional help pulling out the cosmos from last year, adding soil to the in ground planting space, and getting that ready for seeds. I don't think the kids and hubby will mind lending a hand to help get it ready. On top of being pregnant, I am still planning on making this dream of raising chickens, and being a chicken lady a reality! The plan is to get chickens by late March to early April. The potential plan is to have them ready to be outside before June. I'm due in June with baby #3. I don't need to be raising a newborn and baby chicks at the same time. We'll also be building our coop during the 6-8 weeks of the chickens growing. Please pray for us weather is our friend and we can get the coop built in time.

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Last year was our first year planning and mapping out our new permanent garden location. We started gardening at our home in 2020, but in 2021 we moved the entire garden to a new spot. We collected used pallets to create garden boxes. I thought it would save us money due to the inflation of prices on wood and everything else after the pandemic. We will never do that again, I'll explain later. At that time, it saved us a ton of money because it was all free wood! We were able to get 5 decently sized beds out of the good pieces of wood. It was good for the start of something new. I ended up creating a in ground area shortly after for more growing space and to even out the layout of the garden.

Our new location is in our side yard, between our land and our neighbor. Which, thankfully he does not mind the garden. He is polite about mowing the grass away from the beds and from time to time we drop off extra vegetables from our harvest to them as well. A garden should not only benefit you and your family, but your loved ones and your community too! We started from nothing and grew something beautiful that summer! It became a place that we would all gather. I created a little sitting area under this tree in the side yard and often found my husband sitting there as he watched me weed our garden or spend an hour harvesting green beans with the kids.

I would really love to expand the garden to the full length of the side yard. We don't use the space at all. To be honest, it's actually maybe not the most ideal location because it likes to collect water on the side, but in raised beds this shouldn't be much of a problem. My Dad even suggested making that whole side yard a garden as well. I love that he sees my vision. The only thing holding me back from going gun hoe is my lovely husband who likes to put on the breaks. I overwhelm him. I've said that before. It's better to take baby steps and we will get there one day. Just look! He wanted nothing to do with a garden in our yard. Over the course of two growing seasons and him seeing just how well I can grow a bountiful harvest, he's found joy in it too. He sees the benefits of it and embraces it. I've even gotten approval last year to have chickens!!! Something he NEVER would of done before. We would of had the chickens last year, but lifestyle changes put a hold on that. Luckily, we're able to do it this year! Therefore, I will take my tiny piece of good. I will take chickens and a diy chicken coop of my dreams over expanding! I can expand in the future or late summer. We can always add on as we go or when we find the need too.

Last year we focused on building the beds, finding out where the sun hits, what areas got full sun or shade, what grew best where, what grew well, and what didn't. We made notes, we made improvements, we experimented, and we found out what changes to make in the following year. That's the joy of gardening! It's a experiment. You don't have to be good at you. You don't have to be knowledgeable about it. You don't have to acres to grow enough food to last through winter. You just have to start!

Our Growing Methods:

Raised Beds: We built our raised garden beds last year out of used pallets we got for free! We got a trailer load and ended up only using a few. It took way too much time cutting the pallets to work for us and then reassembling them into garden boxes. A project we thought would take 2-4 hours turned into a 8 hour long project. My husband got one box built that is 3 foot by 6 foot out of short pieces of pallets and I managed to assemble 4 boxes that measure 2 foot by 2 foot out of some sturdier pieces of wood. It helped us save on cost of wood, but it wasted a lot of our time. In the future, we will just buy pressure treated 2x6 or 2x8's to build nice boxes and be done in half the time. I do plan to one day rebuild our current boxes and create something more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. By using pressure treated wood the raised boxes would also last longer than pallet wood, that's already weathered and aged. We filled the raised garden boxes with decomposed horse manure that's been sitting for a least 3 years+. If you use manure, you will not want to use anything fresh because it will kill your plants. You will want to aged, decomposed manure. You can get horse or cow manure from local farms for pretty cheap by the truck load. Most farmers would be more than happy to let you take whatever you want! My family's local horse boarding stable charges a small fee per truck load. They will even dig into the oldest manure and load it for you! Thankfully, my parents were kind enough to load their truck twice for us and bring it over. We just had the labor of shoveling it into the boxes. You can also order soil from nurseries or landscape yards to be delivered. Horse manure is nutrient rich and an organic matter to give your garden the extra boost it needs! Horse manure that's been decomposing is drier and will need to be mixed with top soil. I bought a bag of Miracle Grow Garden Soil for each box and mixed it in very well.

No Till In Ground Gardening: I also created a small to medium sized in ground gardening area because I wanted more space to grow. Neither one of us wanted to till a garden space. I physically couldn't and my husband did that our first year gardening. He sorta hated it. haha. So I decided the best way to get what I wanted was to try the "No Till Method". I was a bit weary that this would go well. All I could think about was how the grass was going to grow through the dirt and become one giant mess! To my surprise, we barely had any issues with grass growing up through the dirt, I think most of the weeds came from the horse manure it's self, and it worked out perfectly! The No Till Method is easy. You are simply putting a thick layer of dirt on top of a grass covered area. I did the No Till Space the same way I did the raised boxes. I first started with a thick layer of horse manure, then topped with a few bags of Miracle Grow Garden Soil, and mixed it in really well. Then I spent some time evening out the layer of dirt so it was smooth and ready to be seeded. There is ways of starting early on this method in the fall, by laying out landscape fabric or a tarp on the area you wish to plant. You cover the land from fall to spring, killing the grass, then topping with soil in spring to plant your seeds or starters. It was already close to June when I decided to do this and I didn't have all that time to prep. I chanced it and it worked! YAY! If we expand in the future, I would most certainly use this method again in that expansion.

Square Foot and Companion Gardening:Another method of gardening I have been using for two years is square foot and companion gardening. This is a great way to use the most of your space while also encouraging your plants to thrive off one another for a better harvest. Not to mention, it can be a lot of fun. You can have "themed" raised garden boxes. Example; a salsa garden, a salad garden, a tomato sauce garden. Pinterest is filled with information on companion planting and maybe one day I'll write a post that elaborates on it more. You will basically be using a buddy system. Beans like to be planted with carrots, strawberries, corn, broccoli, and cucumbers. Beans do not do well when planted with garlic and onions. Strawberries should not be planted anywhere near tomatoes or even in soil that tomatoes use to be in, but strawberries do very well when planted with salad greens, broccoli, and cabbage for some ideas. Tomatoes do really well when planted with herbs! Herbs can be planted all between most vegetables as a natural way to prevent pests, bugs, and diseases commonly found when growing gardens! If you do a little research, you'll find that companion planting is easy and beneficial! I'm still learning what does best together too and what I find does well together, but also easily harvestable too. As for square foot gardening, another topic I may elaborate on in a future post, is a very useful way to use every inch of gardening space when you don't have a large garden. I have had this pin saved on Pinterest for a while now and it's my go to guide! Click it to save it on Pinterest! Square foot gardening is pretty simple, larger plants get a full 1- 2 x 2 foot space. While smaller plants use less space, you can fit up to 9 bush bean plants in 1- 1x1 foot space! I planted close to 100 bush beans in my 3 x 6 foot raised garden. To be exact, we could plant up to 162 BUSH BEAN PLANTS! 162!!!! That is a crazy amount! But guess what?! We had a ton of green beans we blanched and freeze over winter. We're still eating from them!

Vertical Gardening: I have been wanting to explore the world of vertical gardening since before I started. I love the looks of the arch made out of cattle panel fencing, but my husband looks at me with a blank stair and says "NO". Maybe one day, ya know? As for now, I will need to figure out a vertical planting method for growing peas. If you have any tips, I would love to hear them! I have never grown peas, but I absolutely love peas and they're one of my new plants I want to learn how to grow this year. Vertical planting can be done in many ways, from trellises, arches, poles, and even whipping up whatever you got on hand. It's just a way for the plant to cling to something supportive and grow upwards. My friend Amy from @themustardseedmama created these teepee trellises for growing cucumbers! I am so impressed by her ability to build these!!! She made these out of branches in her yard, zip ties, and twine!

Garden Planning 2022

I found that drawing out my garden space in a dot journal is helpful to me. I can draw it close to scale and plan out each garden space. It's also a great way to compare your garden plans from previous years and make changes before you even start planting! This is great if you are doing square foot gardening and companion planting too! Planning is key to a successful garden!

My advice to you is to grow what you know and what you already eat regularly. Of course it's going to sound like fun to grow a bunch of different veggies and fruits, but you may not actually eat them all. It can also get overwhelming to care for multiple types of veggies and fruits if you're new to gardening. It's best to start out small and expand each year. My first year, I went all out and didn't feel like I produced much of anything. In my second year, I took it back a step and focused on what we grew well the previous year and what we would consume the most. Our garden thrived! It grew such an over abundance of everything because we took the time to focus on 5 types of veggies vs 15 types! You also don't want to waste your money on growing say eggplant, if you and your family aren't really into eating eggplant. You'll waste it and that's wasting your time, energy, money, and space in the garden.

What works best for me, is growing what we love to eat, what we grow well already, and then each year pick one to two new things to grow. Growing new things is fun, but it also comes with taking time to research how to plant, how to grow, and what to do for that plant to increase the amount of harvest. It's easier to tackle a couple new things than all the new things. With all that said, let's dive into what exactly I am going to plant in my garden this year!

Veggies:

Green Beans
Broccoli
Jalapeño Peppers
Beef Steak Tomatoes
Roma Tomatoes
Zucchini
Cucumbers
Corn
New Red Skin & Golden Potatoes
New Peas

Fruits:

Strawberries
Blueberries

Herbs:

Parsley
Clinatro
Basil

Flowers:

Marigolds
Zinnias

I am confident in my choices this year! I think we will have a great harvest, be able to learn a bit more about canning. It might be challenging to learn that while having a baby too. If anything, I want to improve my own skills on making and freezing tomato sauce and tomato soup. We love making fresh Pico De Gallo from our tomatoes, jalapeño peppers, and cilantro. I discovered the deliciousness of 24 hour refrigerator pickles last year- so that's on the list again. We will be blanching and freezing green beans and peas. I would like to learn how to make strawberry freezer jam too, just to name a few recipes and ways we use our harvest.

In addition to our garden, we will also be raising chickens for the first time ever!! I am over the moon excited about it. We will be getting some chickens locally I believe and possibly some special breeds ordered from a hatchery. The goal is to get them mid March to early April and have them outside by end of May to early June before I deliver this baby.

During the in between time, we will be building our chicken coop ourselves. This is going to be one of my favorite projects ever! I bought a beautiful wood and glass door last year for the coop. I will be following a plan I purchased last year as a guide and going off from there. Ultimately, I would like it large enough to also store the chicken feed inside the coop. I am not sure if that will happen or not until I discuss with my husband the plans and cost. The guide I have is for a 5x6 foot coop. Our's may be more like 6x8 foot is my hopes. We have to follow some minor stipulations since we live in the village. One of those stipulations is the coop has to be raised off the ground and moveable. If it looks like something that is permanent or unable to be moved, we could be taxed for having an additional building on our land. That's something we are trying to avoid. We will also need to build a run attached to the coop. This run will span across the backside of our shed so the overhang of the shed roof provides shade and a dry area during wet seasons. I would also like our run to be completed fenced in. That means the top too. We have WAY too many stray cats, loose neighborhood dogs, and wild creatures to risk any chickens being killed on the daily. I'm not exactly sure how we are going to go about the run, how much it's going to cost, etc. That's more of a situation I will get to when the time comes. Don't worry, I will have a blog post coming soon with all the excitement of raising chickens and building our coop!

The green grass area to the left just behind the no till gardening space and black landscape fabric path, will be the future grounds for the chicken coop.

On the path side, will be where the nesting boxes are located and at the end of the fabric path (far left) will be an entrance door (man door size) to the run.

The run will be about 14 x 14 foot (a strong estimate in size) at first, with hopes to enlarge it in time when funds are available to do so.

I look forward to having a cute white chicken coop with flower window boxes in my near future!

I hope you enjoyed getting a little insight to our garden plans this year. Maybe you're eager to read more about companion planting and square foot gardening. I hope we inspired you to want to garden too! Most of all, we believe you can.

Are you growing a garden or raising chickens? If you are, I want to know about it! I love following like accounts and being able to learn from others. Follow my gardening account on Instagram @daffodilandlilyhomestead and we will follow you back!