What Should I Grow?
3 Questions to Ask Yourself When Deciding What to Grow in Your Home Garden
Choosing what to grow is one of the most exciting steps of home gardening. But it can also be one of the most overwhelming steps! Today I’m sharing 3 questions to think through when deciding what to grow in your home garden.
Tell me if this is familiar… You’re flipping through the seed catalog and a new variety catches your eye! Yeah, sure, you’ve tried this vegetable in the past and didn’t like the taste. But it’s so colorful and perfect, and you know in your heart of hearts that your garden will be complete if you grow this crop! Then 3 months later you harvest, prepare and take your first bite… and you remember how much you actually didn’t like the taste. (If you’re wondering, kale is this vegetable for me!)
To keep you from wasting precious garden space and (even more precious) energy I’m sharing 3 questions to consider when deciding what to grow!
1. What will you or your family actually eat??
The first step I start with might sound silly (and super obvious), but is crucial for me when it comes to gardening - asking myself what will my family actually eat?! It’s easy for me to get caught up in the pictures and descriptions of various types of produce as I flip through my stack of seed and plant catalogs. But if I don’t like it, and no one in the house will eat it, then I shouldn’t grow it. Especially if you’re a new gardener I encourage you to really ask yourself if you’ll eat the produce that you’re planning to grow. Save your garden space for the plants you KNOW you’ll enjoy, adding in just a few new varieties each year. By focusing first on the ones that you know you like, and adding in just a few newcomers each year, you can be sure to enjoy the fruits of your labor, without feeling overwhelmed with a garden full of unfamiliar plants that you’re not even sure you’ll want to eat after harvest.
2. What are your garden goals?
The next question to think through for the upcoming season is what are your garden goals? Do you want vegetables for eating fresh on salads, sandwiches and the like? Or is your goal to have enough produce that you can preserve the season's bounty to enjoy in the fall and winter months? This will impact not just the amount of plants that you plan, but also the types.
Tomatoes are a great example of this - one group of tomatoes, known as indeterminate varieties, produce tomatoes all through the growing season, a little at a time, while the other, categorized as determinate varieties, produce all of their tomatoes within a short time window, usually two to three weeks. If your garden goal is to have fresh tomatoes for sandwiches and salads then the indeterminate varieties are a great option for you. But if you're wanting to can and preserve that wonderful tomato goodness for the future then growing indeterminate varieties could lead to trouble (and heartache!) while you try to build up enough tomatoes to preserve, praying that the first ones ripened don't go bad before you have enough to can! Thinking about your goals for the season ahead will help you to select the crops best suited to meet your needs
3. What can you actually FIT in your growing space?
Once you’ve figured out what you want to grow the next step is to figure out how much you CAN grow. If you're like me you can come up with a list as long as your arm of all of the varieties of vegetables and produce you want to grow! But unfortunately many of us just don't have the space for this. Although it's tempting to try to squeeze as much as you can into your space, maintaining proper plant spacing is key to reducing disease pressure and to ensure healthy plants. Be sure to measure and figure out your garden space, as well as the spacing needs of the plants you are thinking of growing, so you know exactly what you have to work with!
For me, thinking through these questions helps to keep me from getting carried away. My eyes for seeds and plants are nearly ALWAYS bigger than my garden space, but with a little bit of planning I make sure that I grow what we will eat, that will work best for my garden and preserving goals, and that can actually fit in my garden space.
How about you? How do you narrow down your vegetable garden plant selections?? Let me know in the comments below! And when you’ve made your selections come back and look for our reference cards - all of the information you need to know for growing, from sowing to harvest. Be sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss out on the launch!
Happy growing!
