Hello 2024! Wow I can’t believe it’s already time to start another season. I usually start seeds in February to get a jump on the growing season, which isn’t far away! So I have been going over seed catalogs and all the seeds I already have (which is a lot) to start planning for the new growing season. The good news is I already have most of the seeds I want to plant this year. But I always have a hard time picking which varieties to plant! I usually want to try a couple of everything which adds up to a lot, and I run out of space to plant everything. There are a few varieties I use every year though, with several experimental varieties added in for fun.
Goals:
- Do a soil test in early spring
- Better sweet corn harvest. Hoping for enough to even freeze some for winter
- Create or get a cover for the broccoli. The cabbage worms always find the broccoli.
- Grow more cucumbers and melons!
- Take better care of our fruit. The fruit trees and bushes we do have did not get much care last year. I need to change that because we love fruit!
2 week challange
This year I hope to grow enough that we don’t need to go to the store as often. To start figuring out what we really use during a week, we decided to go 2 weeks without going to the store for groceries. It was a mind-shift that really helped me look at what I already have first instead of thinking we needed to make a trip to the store. We also started playing around with more recipes. So it actually wasn’t a hard 2 weeks at all, we had figured out more meal ideas then we needed in those weeks!, but it was interesting to realize what we had run out of (mostly dairy products) that we would need to store a lot more of if we don’t want to go to the store often.
Other benefits to growing more of what we need would be that we can make it fit our dietary needs, taste how we would like (hopefully), and we know how each product was grown (organic fertilizers, etc). I want to give my family highly nutritious food to eat! But produce is going up in price at the stores and the quality and nutritional content is questionable. On top of that, the weather is becoming more unpredictable which means it is harder to grow crops all the way to harvest. A large corporation can’t cover fields to ensure there is a crop harvested. I can cover at least some of our plants. This means if a corporation has a bad harvest, you might not be able to buy a product in the store, or the price will be a lot higher due to high demand. Of course our own little gardens will have good and bad harvest years too. But I think I’d rather use the stores to supplement what we do get rather than being completely dependent on them.
With that, I hope your new year is getting off to a great start! If you have any garden goals for the year I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!
