This afternoon, while I watch the snow fall outside (after I spent several hours outside in it this morning doing chores), I'm shopping for my garden. My favorite seed catalog provides the impetus.
Back to the task at hand: figuring out just how much I need to order. Not how much I want to order, but how much I need to. I know what we eat. I know how much space I have in the garden. Now I just have to blend the two together. And resist the urge to try to squeeze in any new things just because they look neat or yummy.
If you're new to garden planning and seed ordering (I do recommend ordering from a reputable company versus just plucking seed packages off the shelf at the local department store), here are some tips.
1. Define your goal for your garden. Is this for fresh eating during the summer? Do you want to grow enough to can or freeze what you produce? Do you want to go with a certain theme, like a salad garden, or a salsa garden, or a children's garden?
2. Once you have a goal, figure out what plants fit in that goal. For example, if you're doing a salad garden, you probably don't really need pumpkins. Or rutabaga. You need a variety of lettuces, maybe some spinach or chard, as well as slicing cukes and cherry tomatoes or maybe slicing tomatoes, and don't forget the carrots and radishes! Likewise, if your goal is to grow all the ingredients you need to can up a bunch of homemade salsa, you probably don't want to grow spinach or radishes or watermelons.
3. From there, decide how much of each veggie you want to eat, and for how long. Just this summer? Or are you shooting for enough green beans to last you until next year? If you are making the leap into growing and preserving a year's worth of food (or as close as you can get to a year), you need to look at how much of each food item your family currently goes through.
Let's take green beans as an example. If your family eats one can of green beans a week, that means you will need to can about 50 pints of green beans. How many bean plants is that? Well, that's where a nice chart comes in, and you can find some by searching on the internet. What you want is one that gives approximate yield per foot (or row feet) of the most common veggies, along with something that translates that yield into how many pints or quarts of canned goods. The Ball Blue Book of canning has a limited chart for this. My newest copy (which was printed in 1997! I know they recommend getting the latest one, but honestly, for things I can year after year I don't even consult the book anymore anyway, so I wouldn't see any changes the USDA has made in processing times or methods.) says that for 60 quarts of green beans, you'd need to grow approx. 200 row feet of beans. Since 60 quarts is the same as 120 pints, and we're only going for 50 pints, I think we can safely cut that down to 100 row feet--or probably even 80 row feet--and have enough beans. Provided it's a good year, they grow, and you don't have problems with deer or beetles eating the plants. Anyway, for about 100 row feet, we need 3 plants to the foot, so we'd need 300 bean seeds (assuming 100% germination. Let's be safe and get a few more than 300, shall we?).
4. Now that you know how much you're trying to produce over a season, you can figure out how many seed packets, or what size seed packet you need of each thing you are planning to grow. (When you order vs. buy at the grocery/housewares/we-carry-everything store, you have a choice of packet sizes, which can end up being cheaper in the long run.) For our example of green beans, we're looking for 300-400 seeds. A good seed seller will list how many seeds per packet or per ounce (for small seeds) or per pound (for larger/heavier seeds). Going to my favorite seed catalog (pictured above), I see that if I want to grow Kentucky Wonder Bush Beans--which are what my grandma always grew and are the bean I consider a green bean--there are 50 seeds to the packet, or about 900 seeds to the pound. I can order these seeds by the packet, by the pound, by five pounds, or by ten pounds. Hmm. 50 seeds per packet, I need at least 6 packets to get up to our desired 300 seeds. So I look at the price per pound and see that 1 pound of bean seeds costs about $4.50 less than six packets. So my best financial choice is to get the one-pound bag rather than six individual packets.
5. Armed with that info, you can make informed decisions for your garden shopping. Seeds are most viable when they are fresh, so with our buying a 1 pound bag of bean seed, we will probably only use around 1/3 of that pound. What will we do with the other 2/3? We could try to save them, knowing that our germination rate will be lower the next year, and that we will need to store them out of heat and humidity. Or, we could see if we have any friends or neighbors who would like to split the package with us, recouping some of the cost of our bean seeds. If the larger bag isn't a whole lot cheaper, and we don't have anyone to split it with, we might decide to go with those six individual packets instead, spending an extra few dollars and not having to worry about how and where to store those leftover seeds and take our chances with them the next year.
6. What if, once you figure out how much you want to grow of each thing, how many row feet that translates into, and how many/what size seed packets that equals, you find out that your garden isn't big enough? Then comes the agonizing decision of what to cut. Do we reduce our bean patch (and our canning goal) in order to have room for pumpkins? Or do we decide we can always buy a pumpkin for Halloween (maybe from the farmer down the road? Or the neighbor who's backyard is annually a jungle of pumpkin vines?) Or maybe we keep the pumpkins, but skip the pickling cucumbers this year since cukes take a lot of space and we're not sure we like homemade pickles anyway.
Just like being in the grocery store without a list can lead to purchasing way more than you intended to, so can perusing the seed catalogs without a plan and concrete numbers for your garden.
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