It's that time of year again when we all tend to get excited about fresh starts and maybe even declare a few new year's resolutions, so this month, I imagined what some good vegetable gardening resolutions might look like. My objective with this post is not to necessarily help you improve your growing techniques or production consistency. Instead, these ideas will help you improve your ability to integrate your gardening tasks into your life so that you can finish the season as a happy gardener. If you're not happy at the end of the season, you're less likely to continue growing your own food, and I'm on a mission to help more people grow their own food, so let's stay happy while we're at it.
What exactly leads to gardener happiness? Well, I did some reflecting on the changes I have made throughout my years of growing and the many conversations I have had with my Seed to Table students and there were four clear themes that rose to the top.
Know Thyself
Each time you plant a seed in your garden, you are starting a symbiotic relationship between yourself and that plant. You will have a few important tasks to help the plant meet its basic needs, and the plant will give you a plentiful harvest in return. What makes vegetable growing tricky is that each different crop you grow has different relationship requirements. Some need to be harvested every two days, some benefit from consistent pruning and trellising, and some have incredibly narrow harvest windows that you can't afford to miss. It's clear to the experienced gardener that the crops you choose to grow are going to significantly impact the kind of relationship you need to have with your garden.
Thankfully, we can plan a garden to match pretty much any lifestyle you want for yourself in the summer months. The key is to be honest with yourself about how your summer is going to play out and plant a garden that will be compatible with those summer plans. The quickest way for you to point yourself in the right direction is to take my 2 minute gardening quiz. Your quiz results will show you your ideal garden type and recommend a few examples of crops that would be most compatible with your gardening style.
Grow Less
Yes, you read that correctly. It's easy to plant a lot, but less easy to maintain and harvest a lot. That's why a lot of gardener dissatisfaction comes from growing too much. This could mean growing too large of a garden and/or growing too many unique crop varieties. Both of these mistakes can make your gardening experience more challenging than it needs to be, so as you plan your garden this season, consider how simple it could actually be.
First let's address the challenge of limiting your crop varieties. If you've ever looked through a seed catalog, you understand the temptation of trying new crops and selecting a wide variety of flavours to enjoy from your garden, but we have to remember that variety has a cost. It's a lot more complicated for me to grow a dozen tomato varieties than it is to grow one. Even though they are all tomatoes, each variety have slightly different growth habits and harvesting requirements that all need attention from you at different times. I have had years when I've planted 12 or more tomato varieties, but this year we grew just 2. My life was easier, and I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. Could you take this concept further? Certainly! I would even suggest that small gardeners should consider dropping entire crops from their planting list. If your family's garden space is less than 500 square feet and you plant 20 different crops in that small space, none of those crops is going to give you an overwhelming amount of food, but each one will make your to-do list more complicated. What if you filled that space with just 5, 3 or even 1 crop that you really love? As long as you eat and enjoy the food you produce, has not your gardening effort still met its goal with fewer crops? There's no rule that says you have to try to grow every vegetable you want to eat, so why not free yourself from that pressure.
As an exercise in simplicity this year, I planted our entire boulevard with grain, just oats and wheat. It was a real joy to not think about this space nearly as much and know that it was still very productive. The eight full size standard beds of oats shown in the photo below took far less mental energy to manage than the eight quarter size kitchen garden beds in our backyard. This is counter intuitive because the oats occupied 4 times more space than all of our kitchen garden beds combined and you'd think that more growing space equals more work. Nope. What made the oats significantly easier to manage than the kitchen garden beds was that I only needed to plan and two actions, planting and harvesting. A lot of the metal energy we put into our gardens relates to these small decisions about when to plant, prune, trellis and harvest each of our crops, so a small growing space with a diverse collection of crops can still weigh heavily on our minds because it comes with so many little tasks that we need to perform separately.
Then there's the question of garden size. If you don't have physical barriers surrounding your garden, you might fall into the trap of planting more just because you can. "Will we have enough food? I don't know. Let's just plant an extra bed to make sure." Do thoughts like those sound familiar? This is one way to ensure that you'll have enough food, but I've also been down this road enough to understand the cost of overproduction, and in some ways its worse than growing too little. The problem is that all of those extra crops will still need attention from you. Even if you decide to not harvest them, you can look forward to a lot of extra cleanup work. So unless you have an unlimited amount of time to devote to your garden or an unlimited market in which to sell all of your extra produce, I highly recommend that you focus on making your production more consistent and accurate before you try increasing the size of your growing space. I've been recording the yields of my crops for years, so these days it's easy to predict the amount of food I'll get from each crop I grow. Today, these records help inform the Production Calculator that I give to my Seed to Table course students. This tool makes it easy for my students to know how much growing space to devote to each crop, so if you want to skip all the years of trial and error, join us here.
Establish Routines
Have you met someone that wear's the same outfit every day? Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are a few famous thought leaders who have subscribed to this habit. One of the main objectives behind this self-imposed uniform-like dress code is to avoid decision fatigue. When you have important work to do in the world, why waste time thinking about what you're going to wear each day? Once you've found a good outfit that you like, just grab a few duplicates, and move on to the next problem that needs your attention. If it pains you to imagine wearing the same shirt for the rest of your life, consider that you've likely already made routines out of much of your life? Maybe you take the same path to work everyday, maybe you eat the same thing for breakfast...Try messing with any of those routines and notice how much more brainpower it takes.
I'm not going to suggest that you need to wear the same gardening outfit everyday, but I will encourage you to create more consistency in your gardening world, and you can do this by establishing routines. Routines can help you whenever there is a task that you need to complete repeatedly and gardening is filled with tasks like this. Here are a few routines that have made a difference for me.
Wearing a Tool Belt: Whenever it's time for some work in the garden, I strap on a gardening tool belt with all containing all of my essential hand tools and quick fix items to address any problems I discover in the garden. This prevents a lot of walking back and forth searching for gloves, tools, landscape staples, etc.
10 Minute Weeding Blitzes: During one of the early years of running my market garden, weeds were out of control in my garden plots, and I was overwhelmed with the thought of even starting to address the problem. At one point, I managed 7 urban plots averaging 1500 square feet in size so there was a lot of space to cover. Every day I considered weeding, I thought "If I start today, there's no way I could work until everything was weed free." so I didn't even bother start, and of course, that meant the weed problem got even worse. Eventually, I had the idea to just set a timer for 10 minutes and remove weeds until the timer beeped. After those ten minutes, I stopped weeding whether I was done or not. The 10 minute effort didn't seem significant at first ,but I knew I could commit to these 10 minute weeding blitzes every time I visited a plot, so I gave it a try. I was surprised to find that I soon caught up with the weed pressure and eventually didn't even have enough weeding work to fill those 10 minute sessions. The keys to the success of these 10 minute weeding blitzes were that I committed to doing them frequently, and the short 10 minute interval was very achievable even on my busiest days so I never put it off. These days, I've gotten a lot smarter with my weed control so one 10 minute weeding session per week is more than enough to keep each of my gardens weed free.
Harvesting Habits: Quite a few crops require frequent harvesting throughout the summer (eg. cucumbers, summer squash, broccolini) but I don't run out and check on them all the time to see what's ready to pick, because I know that a harvest every 2-3 days will be sufficient. Instead, I'd rather just plan to pick all of these continuous harvest crops every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There's nothing to think about or forget this way. If it's a harvest day, I pick everything that's ready. If it's not a harvest day, I don't worry about it because I know that the next harvest day will come soon enough.
Record Keeping: Whenever I perform a planting or harvesting action, I record the date and details on a spreadsheet that I can pull up on my phone anywhere. It's a quick step that gives me invaluable information about my crop performance that I can use to improve my planning for the next season.
Improve Your Systems
Now it's time to glean some inspiration from the last place you'd expect to find a gardening lesson, the fast food industry. This is an industry that has been able to consistently deliver low cost products thanks to systemized efficiency and standardization. I know you wouldn't want the same fast food products to come out of your garden, but let's still imagine that your garden was a fast food restaurant and that I am your regional manager paying you a visit for an annual inspection. My job is to make sure your garden restaurant is providing the highest returns so I'm on the hunt for hidden costs and major inefficiencies. What would I find if you walked me through all of your gardening season? Where would I see tedious jobs that are not that productive? Which tasks are annoying the staff? In what ways could your work be reduced with a better piece of equipment or a more efficient process?
You've likely thought about questions like this on your own, because problems in our garden tend to grab our attention, but have you solved all of these problems yet? Not likely. Gardeners have a reputation of being hard workers, and I appreciate that, but sometimes we willingly overcome problems with extra work without ever stopping to think about how the work could be reduced and still give us the same result. Gains like this only come from working ON your garden instead of just IN your garden. So this year, before it comes time to perform the many annual tasks that you've become accustomed to, devote some energy to improving your systems so that each or even just one of those tasks becomes easier. A few of my favourite upgrades from past years have been the building of our nursery greenhouse, the automated drip irrigation systems, and our washing station, but changes as simple as reorganizing your indoor seed starting area or the installation of some weed suppression materials can also contribute greatly to your gardening wellness. So this coming year, I challenge you to devote a respectable portion of your gardening time to improving your gardening systems, instead of continuing to labour through your growing pains of the past. This post shares more about some of the best upgrades we've made to our growing systems.
Which of these gardening resolutions are you going challenge yourself with this year? I promise you won't regret any of them, but whether or not you choose to go ahead with one of these suggestions, at least promise yourself that you are not going to keep repeating the gardening frustrations you've struggled with in past seasons. Thanks to the cyclical nature of gardening, we all have a chance to reflect and improve our practice every season. I hope this post serves as a kick in the butt for you to finally address that nagging issue you've been putting off and set yourself on course for a more pleasurable gardening future. Happy gardening!
