2013 Garden Plan

I thought it was high time for me to share our 2013 garden plan. As usual, we have high hopes for a fabulous year in the garden. As I shared last month, we are going to start many of our crops from seed indoors using our DIY seed starting rig. We will grow several new species of plants as well as a few varieties that are new to us. Hubby Dear has been spending a lot of his spare time reading about new techniques that we can use to boost yields in our garden. In an attempt to fight back against the wee vicious beasties (a.k.a. squash bugs) that devastated our zucchini crop last year, we are incorporating some flowers to attract beneficial insects and will also try using row covers. 

The north half of the garden. 

I'm sorry the plan came out so blurry, but hopefully you can read it well enough to follow along. Assuming there are people following along. I know not everyone finds garden plans as entrancing as I do! We bought our seeds from a variety of catalogs. Baker Creek Seeds, Seed Saver's Exchange, Johnny's Selected Seeds, and Peaceful Valley are my favorites. I also bought a few seeds I couldn't get elsewhere from Southern Exposure Seeds and Territorial Seeds.

Zucchini - We're trying Costata Romanesco again this year. The one tiny zucchini we ate before the wee vicious beasties destroyed our plants last year was fabulous.

Watermelon - Golden Midget is another re-do from last year. Our vine plants just were eaten up by bugs and didn't produce much.

Cucumber - Boston Pickling We grew 'Double Yield' from Seed Saver's Exchange last year and it was a total bust. Time to try something new.

Corn - We are planting Golden Bantam again this year. Despite living in the corn belt, we have the worst luck growing corn. We think Golden Bantam would have been a good choice for us but we planted it too late last year. If at first you don't succeed...

Pumpkin - We have successfully grown 'Baby Pam' in the past, but decided to try Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkins this year. I wish I had room for all the varieties of squash I'd love to grow.

Kale - Dwarf Blue Curled  I'll be honest. I've never tried Kale before. Not that I haven't wanted to, but it is not something that our podunk small town grocery store carries. Everyone I know raves about how good kale is (especially in chip form) and how good it is for you, so I thought it was time to grow some. If we don't like it, at least poultry will appreciate it.

Garlic - We grew Music variety garlic last year, enjoyed a nice harvest, and saved back some of the best heads for this year's crop.  You can read about how we planted our garlic this past fall here. Now that I have finished using all our garlic from 2012, I know how much more I should have planted for this year. I need to double or triple this next year!

Onion - We hope to get the hang of seed starting this year so we can start our onions indoors from seed next year. In the meantime, we are buying pricier plants of Patterson storage onions.

Strawberries - Our plants from 2011 and 2012 survived the summer and have nicely filled in. The Lord willing, we should have an excellent harvest of Earliglow and Tribute strawberries this year.

Lettuces - We are planting Encore Lettuce Mix and Winter Density, two favorites of ours. We are also adding Forellenschluss, a pretty spotted lettuce whose name means 'Speckled Trout Back'. Fun!

Spinach - We grew 'Corvair' last year and really liked it. I only eat spinach as a baby salad green and I don't like savoyed leaves, so it worked great for us. Unfortunately, Johnny's no longer carries that variety so we will be growing its replacement, Pigeon.

Tomatoes - Ah, the king of the summer garden! We have some new tricks up our sleeves to use on our tomatoes this year. Our yield was drastically reduced by the weather, but we think that with sufficient mulching, proper watering, and pruning, we might do better this year, even in a drought. We are growing Amish Paste, Green Zebra, Brandywine (Sudduth's Strain), Gold Medal, Italian Heirloom, and Dester varieties. Baker Creek sent us a free packet of Gypsy tomato seeds, so we will be attempting to start that variety from seed. The rest will be transplants. We didn't want to chance our whole summer's crop on beginner seed starter's luck!

Peppers - Peppers will be one of our most challenging plants to start from seed this year. More on that in mid-March when we start them. We are growing Bull Nose Bell, Chocolate Beauty, Traveler Jalapeno, Aurora, and King of the North.

Broccoli - We hope that by starting Waltham 29  indoors that we will actually get to taste some homegrown broccoli. We're planting broccoli, cabbage, and kale in mid-February, so more on that soon.

Cauliflower - Hubby Dear really wanted to grow Purple of Sicily which is, unsurprisingly, a purple cauliflower. I remain skeptical about this choice.

The south half of the garden. Next year we will finally have all our garden boxes
built for a total of  608 intensively managed sq. ft.

Green beans - How could we not go with our famous "zombie beans"? Just when you think they are dead from the heat of summer, they spring back to life and produce a second crop. Provider it will be again this year.

Cabbage - Farao is one of the very few hybrids that we still grow, but I am very loyal to this variety. It is easy to grow and tastes great. I just need to learn to like sauerkraut so I don't have to make umpteen batches of  bierocks when the cabbages all get harvested at once!

Radish - Radishes were one crop that we were never short of last year. We are growing Early Scarlet Globe, Watermelon, and White Icicle this time around. I vaguely remember reading about someone using White Icicle Radishes as a trap crop for aphids and other pests, so that is why that variety got added to the mix.

Cantaloupe - We will grow Kansas again.

Carrot - The carrot is our gardening nemesis. It doesn't matter what permutations we have tried with watering, depth of planting, etc., we have not had very good luck with carrots at all. Hope springs eternal, because we're trying again, this time with Bolero pelleted seeds.

Peas, Pod - Sugar Sprint, another repeat.

Peas, Shelling - We're switching to Little Marvel for reasons of economy. We really liked the Lincoln variety we grew last year but this kind is much cheaper. Those pennies add up.

Beets - We're trying Chioggia again as well as Detroit Dark Red.

Swiss Chard - Five Color Silverbeet We're growing an awful lot of this vegetable and no one in our family even likes it! It is very pretty and the poultry loves it.

Eggplant - Again, not a vegetable that most folks in my family will eat, but Mini Me wants to grow it and we're starting Florida High Bush eggplant from seed.

Potato - Yukon Gold again.


We've got our fingers crossed that the insanely hot temperatures and drought abate this summer so that all the love we're pouring into our garden will translate into some actual food. While I love square foot gardening, we found out the hard way that heat and drought hits a raised bed filled with Mel's Mix much harder than it does the soil at large. That's one reason we'll be deepening our boxes in upcoming seasons.



Beneficial Insect Attractants/Companion Plants: 

We garden organically, so the only pesticides we will use in our garden is my pest repellent spray, a bit of Bt (a type of bacteria that kills caterpillars) for cabbage worms, diatomaceous earth for creepy crawlies, and some neem oil for wee vicious beasties like squash bugs.

This year we decided to focus on attracting the good kind of insects to our garden, the kinds that will eat the baddies up while leaving our veggies alone. Certain flowering plants attract beneficial insects and our plan is to sprinkle them liberally around the garden. They include:


Calendula
Marigold
Borage
Nasturtium
Dill and Basil - We usually plant these only in my herb garden near the house, but they are also awesome beneficial and companion plants.

I'll be interested to see what difference these plants will make in our garden. At the very least, it will be more colorful!



Out of the garden:

We never have enough room for all the plants we want to experiment with.

Jellymelon - Hubby Dear has been intrigued by this plant for years. Also known as the African Horned Cucumber, it supposedly tastes like a mix of pomegranate and citrus. I wasn't willing to substitute this for cantaloupe or another of our regular vine plants, so we will try to grow this among the baby trees in our orchard.

Sunflowers - We grew Peredovik black oil sunflowers for our birds last year. They loved it! We are tripling the amount we are going to plant, plus adding American Giant sunflowers and a Sunflower Mixture just for fun. The sunflower patch will be sited south of our main garden and east of our orchard.

"Chicken Mix" - We are going to build our birds their very own square foot garden (covered with hardware cloth so they can't scratch it up) in their run and sow it with an Omega 3 chicken forage blend.


That, more or less, is what we have planned. Have you made your garden plans and purchases yet? 

2012 Garden Plan

I don't know what the weather's been like where you live, but around here it hasn't felt anything like winter. It's been so spring-like that I have felt an urgent desire to get our garden up and running. Despite the balmy temps, it is still a bit too early, but it won't be long before we'll be planting our early spring garden.

We learned a lot from our garden in 2011. Some things will stay the same in 2012 but of course we're also going to make some changes. I can't help it. I'm a fiddler. Sadly, that doesn't mean that I play the violin. I just keep fiddling with things even if they are perfectly fine. It's a sickness.

The first big thing we're doing is adding yet more square foot garden beds.

Please excuse my sloppy handwriting and failure to use a ruler! 

In the oh-so-beautifully-freehand diagram above, our existing garden is to the left. Our ultimate goal is to double the size of our garden, but since constructing and filling all those beds last year nearly killed us, we're taking it in stages. We are building just three new beds this year and saving our energy for expanding our orchard and dealing with our chickens.

In some of the space that will be filled with boxes in the future, we are going to plant sunflowers for our chickens. We'll see how well they do considering the prior luck we had gardening in our poor clay soil.

The current garden plans for both halves of the garden are below. I'm sorry they came out kind of blurry - not sure why the scan is so poor.

The "Old Garden"

The New Garden

The boxes are color-coded with the approximate date of planting for Zone 5.

Although we are growing many of the same types of vegetables as last year, we are changing quite a few varieties. Many of the changes aren't because the previous variety was a failure; this year we simply decided to focus mainly on open-pollinated, heirloom varieties.

We ordered our seeds, plants, and bulbs from several sources: Johnny's Selected Seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Seed Saver's Exchange, Peaceful Valley, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Stark Bro's.

Beet - Bulls' Blood
-We selected this type of beet because of its particularly excellent greens. "Greens" is a bit of a misnomer, though, since the leaves are dark red in color. We may or may not eat the greens (I may save them for our rabbits and chickens), but we'll definitely eat the beets!


Broccoli - Waltham 29
-We planted a different variety of broccoli last fall and it didn't get very far. I really think we should be starting seeds indoors and then setting out transplants, but we thought we'd give direct sowing another shot with this variety.

Cabbage - Farao
-The Thinker planted this cabbage last year and it was ridiculously delicious. I also think the plants are absolutely gorgeous and want to plant some in some concrete planters I have by our front porch.


Cantaloupe - Kansas
-Our beloved "Minnesota Midget" melons just didn't like to grow on a trellis, so we searched for a new candidate that might like trellising better. The description of "Kansas" from Baker Creek drew us in, "The vines are vigorous and the yield is great; oval-shaped, ridged and netted fruit; the flesh is orange and has exceptional flavor; very delicious! A very dependable variety; fruit weigh around 4 lbs. One of our most endangered varieties and also one of the best."

Carrot - Danvers 126 Half Long
-We have reserved a double-depth box (12") for carrots this year. I'm hopeful they will grow larger and straighter with the extra room. It was kind of fun finding all sorts of funny shaped roots last year, though. I try to keep it family friendly on my blog or I'd post some of the more unusual specimens. ;)

Cauliflower - Snowball Self-Blanching
-We had the same problem with cauliflower last fall as we did the broccoli, though we did at least get some small heads. We shall see if "Snowball" does better.

Unrelenting heat and lack of rain really hurt our corn last year.
At least we've figured out a support system that works for
square foot gardens.  

Corn - Golden Bantam
-Corn is our Achilles heel. We never have been able to get a decent crop, which is pretty ridiculous considering we live in corn country! We're trying a dependable old variety and reducing the number of boxes we're devoting to corn this year.

Cucumber - Double Yield
-I favor pickling-type cucumbers. They are good for pickling, of course, but they are great for fresh eating as well.

The "Provider" beans in the foreground were pretty much toast but miraculously returned
to life and gave us another crop 

Green Beans - Provider 
-How could we not plant this variety? Not even last year's record heat could knock these beans down; they literally returned to life after getting fried, leading to my pet name for them - "Zombie Beans". High yielding, too.


Garlic - Music
-We planted many cloves of "Music" garlic last fall. It was heavily mulched with straw. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the field mice left it alone over the winter!

The Thinker's box early last year (Clockwise): Beets, Pod Peas,
Farao Cabbage, Winter Density Lettuce

Lettuce - Winter Density, Encore Lettuce Mix
-After a slow start, lettuce was one of our big successes last year. We're planting "Winter Density" again plus an organic version of the lettuce mix we enjoyed so much. Again, any extras will go to the chickens and/or rabbits.

Nasturtium - Empress of India 
-Mini Me wanted to grow some flowers in the kids' garden box and this was her selection. Nasturtiums are edible, but I imagine we'll mostly just enjoy their beauty.

Onion - Copra
-We're planting transplants this year rather than sowing seed or growing from sets. Hopefully they will grow larger than last year's marble-sized crop.


Pea (Shell) - Lincoln and Pea (Pod)- Sugar Sprint
-If we can keep the mice away, we should get a nice crop. Sugar Sprint doesn't need stringing - bonus!


Peppers - Ancho Gigante, Bull Nose Bell, Chocolate Beauty, Jalapeno, Orange Bell, Tolli’s Sweet Italian, King of the North, Cayenne
-Peppers did so well for us last year! New varieties to try out for 2012 plus my nemesis, cayenne. 


Potato - Yukon Gold
-Another repeat variety from last year. 

"Cherriette" radishes we harvested last spring

Radish - Purple Plum                                                                                                                                        

- Radishes are the one veggie I don't get very excited about, but they are one of Hubby Dear's favorites. He couldn't resist trying out this purple variety.

Spinach - Corvair
-We weren't able to get spinach to grow last fall, but we're bravely forging ahead in the spring. 


Strawberry - Earliglo, Tribute
-One of our boxes of strawberries mysteriously died last spring. (Dang, now that I type all our failures out, it seems like 2011 wasn't so good after all!) We are replacing that and filling in the remainder of the box that Mini Me successfully nurtured.


Sunflower - Peredovik Black Oil
-This type of sunflower is supposed to produce high quality seeds for bird feed. They will be treats for my chickies. 


Swiss Chard - Five Color Silverbeet
-Everyone says that Swiss Chard is a pretty much foolproof vegetable. I can vouch that it is not! All the chard we planted last fall failed to germinate. Well, these fools are trying again! 


Tomato -  Amish Paste, Green Zebra, Brandywine, German Pink, Rosso Sicilian, Gold Medal, Italian Heirloom     
-The heat last summer really stunted our tomato production, but even so, we managed to have fresh tomatoes from our garden until January! I'm hopeful that I'll be able to can many more quarts of spaghetti sauce in 2012. 

Watermelon - Golden Midget
-This is an unusual type of watermelon. One of our problems with the "Little Baby Flower" melons we grew last year was that we couldn't tell if they were ripe or not. Since they were trellised, we didn't get the usual yellow-white spot on the ground. We checked tendril browning, thumped the heck out of them - none of the usual methods of determining ripeness worked. Golden Midget shouldn't be a problem because the melons turn yellow when they are ripe! 


Zucchini - Costata Romanesco
-Carol Deppe gave rave reviews about this zucchini in her book, The Resilient Gardener. Apparently it is great both fresh or dried. 



That's it! More than you ever wanted to read, I'm sure. What plans are you making for your spring garden? Are you growing anything new and exciting this year? 

Hubby Dear's got Excel... and He's Not Afraid to Use It

Yesterday Hubby Dear and I took advantage of the amazingly lovely weather (76 degrees and very low humidity. Wow!) and went outside to measure and plot our chicken run/moat.

We're going to begin work on the fencing soon, so it was imperative that we got accurate measurements. Mere measurements weren't enough for my uber-analytical spouse. Anything worth doing is worth doing with an Excel table, right? Here's the diagram he created:

A diagram of our future chicken palace/moat/garden combo 

We're researching the best fencing options to use (ideas welcome from experienced chicken owners!), but the point of greatest concern to me is the gate into the garden. In order for this to be a true chicken moat, the chickens have to be able to go all the way around the garden, but yet stay secure in the run. That means we have to either create some sort of tunnel (like the one used in this chicken moat installation) or bridge and underpass (see an example here).  What do you think? Will chickens actually go through a tunnel? Sounds kinda like a low-budget circus act to me.

Hubby Dear was on a roll after he finished the chicken moat diagram so he began to plot out our orchard-to-be. We have three pecan trees arriving in November and apples in the spring. You can bet Hubby Dear will have it all plotted out perfectly months in advance. Gotta love having a geek for a husband! (Seriously, I love it. Other than the fascination with Star Trek. That I could do without.)

Calling all poultry fanciers! Hubby Dear and I could use your best chicken run construction tips, plus your opinion on the chicken moat bridge vs. tunnel debate.  

My summer reading list and plans for the future

In between accidents and trips to the hospital, I've been busy reading and making plans for our homestead. Can you guess what we're planning based on my selection of library books?

My reading material

Of course, when I say "we're" planning, what I really mean is that I'm planning and Hubby Dear is tolerating, albeit with sighs and massive amounts of eye-rolling.

We're going to begin with two or three pecan trees this fall and add in several apple trees in the spring. We want to plant lots of other types of fruit trees, but I know better than to try and do too much at once. We I decided to start with apples and pecans because both are nutritious foods that have the potential to store well. Pecans, in particular, take a few years to start producing, so they got bumped up to the top of the project list. Since we have such rotten soil, we're going to have to take particular care to prepare the planting sites.

We're also going to expand our square food garden and fence it in preparation for the spring's big project: a chicken coop, chicken moat, and, yes, chickens.

A chicken moat plan from Mother Earth News

The above diagram is not exactly what our chicken moat will look like, but you get the picture. The idea of a chicken moat is that you surround your garden with a chicken run, which reduces weed and bug problems. Plus, you raise your own meat and eggs and get a rich source of compost for the garden. We need to start setting up the fencing around the garden area now because we are going to be swamped with garden work in the spring. I'd rather get the chickens now, but first things first. :)

Summer's not even over, but I just can't resist planning for next year. Are you planning a major addition to your yard, garden, or preps in the year to come? Do you have any advice for my ventures? I'd love to hear from you!

Our 2011 Garden Plan and February Garden Chores

I realize that most people don't do much in the way of gardening during February, and we're usually right with them. During the last week, however, we have had such wonderfully moderate temperatures that we've been able to get outside and get some work accomplished. Spring is such a busy time in the garden, so we're really thankful if we can get some of our chores out of the way.

The hills are not exactly alive - with music or anything else - but they are slightly thawed

The first thing we accomplished was mowing down our Heritage raspberry bushes. That is something we do in the late fall or winter every year. Normally, Heritage raspberries will give you two smaller crops in June and September. If you cut them down to the ground, they produce one, larger crop. This is much better for canning and freezing purposes.

I promise there were raspberries here!

We've also started work on our new square foot garden boxes. As I shared previously, we're converting our entire garden from a traditional row garden to a square foot garden. Here's the plan for our new garden. It is color-coded by planting date for our area.

*If you've read this post before, you might have noticed this plan has changed a few times. That's because Hubby Dear keeps tinkering with it. I think it's set now.

We're allowing our two oldest children, The Thinker and Mini Me, to plan, plant, and maintain the single 4x4' box that is furthest west on the plan. They've chosen an eclectic mix of cabbage, carrots, lettuce, beets, peas, peppers, and strawberries. That should be interesting, to say the least.

We made the boxes, covered the ground with weed cloth, and put the boxes in place during the fall. Now we have to make A LOT of Mel's Mix to fill the boxes.

Everytime we go to the "big city", we're filling the back of the family mini van with vermiculite, peat moss, and all the different kinds of compost we need to make Mel's Mix. We'll work on filling the boxes with Mel's Mix over time. Otherwise, it would be an overwhelming task.

Hubby Dear's Garden Plan lets us know which boxes are going to be planted first, so we're filling them in order.

This box is double deep for potatoes and still needs another batch of dirt added to it

The only problem is, yes, it is very pleasant outdoors, but it is w-i-n-d-y. We live on the top of a hill, so we are naturally more windy anyway, but when we have unseasonable temperatures? Your hat better have a stampede string. Mine doesn't, so I spent some time chasing it around the yard.

Even though we knew better, we decided to try and make up some Mel's Mix. We mixed the components together in our garage and all was well until we tried to dump it into the garden box. I could probably use some dermabrasion, but I hadn't intended to get it from a tornado of Mel's Mix! So much for that project. Hopefully good weather and Hubby Dear's work schedule will coincide again soon. We have to make 17 more batches of Mel's Mix and lay down pea gravel to cover the pathways between the boxes.

We did successfully make a bunch of garden purchases. Here is the list of the seeds we ordered from our favorite seed company, Johnny's Selected Seeds:

Green Bush Beans - Provider
Carrots - Nelson
Corn - Mystique Bicolor
Cucumbers - Alibi
Lettuce - "Allstar Gourmet Lettuce Mix", Winter Density buttercrunch
Onions - Copra storage onion
Peas - Caselode (shelling), Sugar Sprint (snap)
Potatoes - Yukon Gold
Pumpkin - Baby Pam
Radish - Cherriette
Watermelon - Little Baby Flower
Beets - Red Ace
Cabbage - Farao

We also bought inoculant for the beans and peas. This year, we're planning on buying tomato and pepper plants from a local nursery, but in the future, we hope to start our own seeds at home. Also missing from list above is cantaloupe. We'll buy seeds of our favorite variety (Minnesota Midget) from the same local nursery.

We're getting our strawberries shipped to us from Stark Bros. in late March. We ordered 75 plants of Earliglow (a June-bearing variety) and 25 of Tribute (an Everbearing variety). We also ordered a few more raspberries to fill out our row. We're going to plant a couple of pecan trees but Stark Bros. won't have those in stock until fall, so I guess that's when we'll be planting them.

Something else we bought that I think will be a real help is this Tractor Scoot from Gardener's Supply Co.

Image from Gardeners.com

It is small enough to fit through the aisles of our garden. We can sit and weed or harvest at our leisure. It's kind of a luxury purchase and, frankly, probably intended for the senior citizen set, but I think we'll really use it a lot. Maybe it will encourage me to get out and weed more often since I won't resemble one of those kitschy garden ornaments:

Our neighbors and the cows in the pasture next to us will appreciate it. They still send me thank you notes for installing better blinds in our master bedroom.

And that's what we've been doing to get ready for the growing season.

Are you planning on gardening this year? Have you been busy getting ready for spring?

'Tis the Season

 'Tis the Season....

for gardening catalogs.

Every time I open our mailbox, it seems like there's another two or three seed catalogs mixed in amidst the bills and late-arriving Christmas cards. There's nothing like thinking about sun-warmed, ripe tomatoes growing in your backyard to cheer you up on a gloomy winter's day. All this is to say: The time to plan your 2011 garden is now, so get to crackin'! :)

I'm not a gardening expert, but I have been doing it for a while and I do know a few things.

1. Find out when to plant for your area. If you do not know your plant hardiness zone, try this map. Once you know your hardiness zone, find out when it is the best time to plant your desired crops. There's a huge range of climate variation in the US and if you're not careful, you'll plant things too early or too late. Too late or too early = reduced harvest or maybe even killing your plants. Around here, we aim to get potatoes into the ground by St. Patrick's Day. Those of you in the South probably aim for sometime in February, so you see how important it is that you know your planting dates.
2. Decide what to plant. If you're a rank beginner, start small. Pick four or five types of things that sound fun and grow well in your area. If you start with a giant garden, you may find yourself overwhelmed. I've learned the hard way that it is better to start small and get bigger every successive year. 
3. Ask for advice. Ask friends who are experienced gardeners for their recommendations. What plants are ideal for your area? What problems are commonly encountered? My family has a vineyard and my Dad knows a lot about the diseases common to fruit in our area. He warned me that fire blight runs rampant around here, so if I want to grow apples and pears organically, I should select varieties resistant to it. Good to know! At the same time, don't be afraid to try things your friends might say are impossible. A person Hubby Dear works with is a fabulous gardener and he insisted that we wouldn't be able to grow watermelons - the coyotes would run off with them! Well, we tried growing watermelon last year and the coyotes left them alone.  

And finally, something we learned the hard way...

4.   If you're going on vacation this summer, think about that when you plan. We were gone for two weeks in July 2009 and missed the peak of our garden. We didn't think about that in May and June when we spent all that time planting, watering and weeding.  


Hubby Dear and I made our 2011 garden plan this past fall. We are ordering most of our seeds from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Their seeds are of high quality and many organically-grown varieties are available.We're planting some old favorites as well as some vegetables that are new to us:

- Tomatoes - several varieties. San Marzano for canning.
- Cucumbers. I always plant a variety for pickling and that does fine for fresh eating as well.
- Sweet peppers
- Peas - both sugar snap and English peas.
- Bush beans - For fresh eating and canning
- Cantaloupe - Minnesota Midget is the BEST variety I have ever tasted.
- Watermelon
- Corn

One of our Minnesota Midget Cantaloupe hills last year. (Ignore the weeds!)

New for 2011:

- Onion - We've never tried to grow onions and they're something my family didn't grow when I was a kid, so this is a new realm for us.
- Radishes
- Carrots - We tried to grow carrots at our old house and it was a miserable failure. The plants died off right after germination, even before they were large enough to thin.
- Lettuce - Both head and loose leaf varieties.
- Potatoes - Hubby Dear and I have never grown these at our house. I've helped my parents, though.
- Strawberries

 We have also reserved part of our garden for the children. Our oldest two kids get to pick what they would like to grow and they will be in complete charge of planting, watering, weeding, etc.

In addition to our vegetable garden, we have an herb garden planted up close to our house. It has:

-Parsley
-Sage
-Rosemary
-Thyme
-Lavender
-Spearmint
-Dill
-Chives
-Cilantro
-Sweet Basil

My herb garden in early May. It'svery near my kitchen, which is so convenient.

Most of these are perennials, although I have to replant tender plants like basil and rosemary each year.

We also have a row of raspberries that we are going to expand as well as some thornless blackberry bushes. Our "orchard" consists of a solitary dwarf sour cherry tree that we got as a freebie from Stark Brothers. One of these days we intend to plant many more fruit trees, but I think we have enough on our plate for 2011, don't you?  

I said it was a dwarf! This is one of the three trees total that we have on our 5 acres.

Are you planning to garden in 2011? If so, what are your plans?