Garden Planning, 2021...Part 2

Last week I shared some factors that we use to determine how much we will be gardening this year.  Once we got that sorted, we had to decide what we would be growing.  That's what I'm sharing this week!

We have four fenced, covered spaces to grow food - the Pumpkin Patch (What do you grow in there, Laura?  It's a head-scratcher!), the Turkey Run, the Chicken Run, and the Big Garden (which is only Big compared to the others).  We do not have turkeys or chickens anymore, but that's some nice soil to grow in, plus the fencing was already there...so we use what we have!  Here's our plan for this year:

Pumpkin Patch:  Kabocha pumpkins.  We tried these last year, and they did well here.  More important, we love the flavor, color and texture.  As I'm writing this, they have been off the vine 4 1/2 months and are not shriveling or anything, so they seem to keep well.  If I just grow one type, I have the option to save seed, too!

I think this is a sugar pumpkin.  We're only growing Kabochas this year.

Chicken Run:  This space has a bit of shade in the afternoon and the hen house (it's the garden shed now) provides protection from the prevailing winds.  It's a...cooler garden, so it's a great place for a longer season of spring crops.  We're planning to grow lettuces, spinach, chard, radishes, beets and carrots in that space.  I also have the strawberry plants there, because they get some protection from harsher weather.  I may move them to a sunnier space within that run, but I think it's a good spot overall for them.

Turkey Run:  This is a fairly small area (we never had lots of turkeys at once), but it's perfect for melons.  We're planning to plant the shorter season, mini cantaloupes and watermelons.  We had them planted last year, and while we got a few, we would have had a really strong yield if we hadn't had an early September killing frost.  

Miniature cantaloupes.

Sugar Baby watermelons.

Tiny, but very tasty!

Big Garden:  This is the place for plants that like full sun and a fair amount of heat.  We're planning to use it for zucchini (2 hills - I love zucchini soup!), Armenian cucumbers, which grow really well here if they are in a hot, sunny spot, green beans, chickpeas, green peas and - if there is space - more beets.  Last year was the first time I grew chickpeas, and it was fantastic!  (I tried lentils too, and that was...not so fantastic, unless you were an aphid.)  Green chickpeas can be blanched and frozen, and taste a lot like a cross between edamame and field peas.  The yield was really good, especially considering we'd never grown them before.  They were a little hard to shell, but that's because we picked them green.  If we'd left them to harden off and dry on the plant in the field, like soybeans, I think we could have whacked them on the inside of a bucket and the shells would have fallen right off.  I'll let you know about that *this* year!

I think my two favorite vegetables that we grow are zucchini and green beans.

The compound leaf and the pods are chickpeas.  (The fernlike stuff is dill.)

Fresh picked green beans, being rinsed before blanching and freezing.

Herbs:  I've moved all the herbs that the deer like over by the back door walkout to our basement.  I've got parsley, a spot for basil, mint, thyme, and green onions. The things the deer won't eat are in a border around the big garden.  That area has some repeats - green onions and thyme - along with chives, walking onions, sage, lovage, dill, and oregano.

You may be wondering - what about potatoes?  What about TOMATOES?  The thing is, there is a not-so-cute little grub here that eats holes in potatoes.  Potatoes with holes in them don't keep well.  Combine that with the regularly occurring sales on potatoes here (even in this very weird year, we could get 5 pounds for .89 a couple of times, and for some reason, over the course of the summer, Safeway kept adding an offer to our Safeway card for a free 10 pound bag of potatoes.  I think I got 40 pounds.), it's hard to justify the space and the water it takes to grow them.  

Tomatoes here make really nice plants, and really nice green tomatoes, but they are a semi-tropical, and our nights are quite cool all summer long.  By the time they are ready to ripen, the temperatures don't really suit them.  Eventually, they do turn red, but the skins are pretty tough and leathery.  I have to cover them/uncover them a lot toward the end of the season, and all for tomatoes that are not so great fresh (I end up making tomato soup with them).  Meanwhile, tomatoes are pretty consistently 88-98 cents a pound here (Romas), and while they're not the same as a garden tomato, our garden tomatoes aren't the same as a good garden tomato either.  

All the things I said about tomatoes are true about growing peppers here too...except we don't even get to the 'hey, there's a pepper!' stage most years.  Corn is nice, but takes a lot of space and a lot of water, and it seems like the deer would be tempted to evolve opposable thumbs, break into the toolbox and dismantle some fencing.  

So that's the plan,  It'll be a simple garden, with things that actually like it here, and don't need a lot of coddling.  What are YOU growing this coming year?