2022 Garden Goals
My focus for 2022 is to live as simple a life as possible, both in and out of the garden. Perhaps that sounds ambitious and misplaced given my first book publishes in March and I’ve got other projects in the works, but I do believe that I can mute the noise that tends to distract me and create negative tension in my daily life. I look forward to sharing my journey with you as I strive to live a more balanced life.
This yearning has also led me to really try to grow what we know this year. To take inventory this winter of our root cellars and refine our growing space to continue to dial in the seasonal needs of our family of four. It’s the third week of January and we are still enjoying Brussels sprouts, Chinese cabbage, red cabbage, carrots, daikon, radishes, kohlrabi, turnips, beets, potatoes, onions, garlic, winter squash, popcorn, cornmeal, dry beans, sesame seeds, & ginger — plus canned tomatoes, dill pickles, roasted & frozen peppers and eggplants, and more. We are supplementing our vegetables a bit this time of year, but minimally, trying our best to build menu plans around the food we have stored from our fall harvests. It’s a fun and rewarding exercise in culinary creativity and living in the moment.
Never enough carrots. I hope my summer travel schedule is not repeated this year and I can focus at the right time to thin our summer carrot garden/root cellar beds. We will surely run out of carrots before May this year.
Our goals are to continue to grow what we know. I am not growing new-to-us vegetables this year, with one minor exception: red-veined sorrel. I’ll tuck this into our herb garden and see if it will perennialize for us.
We want to grow more flour corn for nixtamalizing and making our own tortillas. I’ve ordered seed from Native Seed Search to grow here. Being latitude-sensitive with seed hailing from much farther south, I am cautiously optimistic it will yield well for us and I can save seed and keep growing it in our northern garden. I am looking forward to this slow food and growing exercise.
One of the anchors of the summer garden and winter menu is tomatoes. Currently, the tomato garden plans are in flux, but we may plant an overall smaller garden. I think we had 28 tomato plants last year — about half were slicers or cherry tomatoes. I know tomatoes are everything to so many, but I’d rather have more beans for more vegetarian meals come winter. Because winter is long and I want to feed us for as long as possible.
Almost all the varieties seen here will make a comeback this summer. Narrowing down the tomato varieties is one of the most grueling winter tasks a gardener faces.
I am resisting the urge to allocate space for flashy Instagram photos. Instead, we are going to increase the number of indeterminate paste tomatoes for saucing as they were the big winner last summer of our tomato garden. More on tomatoes in a separate post very soon!
We are going to drop peanuts for 2022 as the rodents destroyed any hopes of even a small harvest — they beat us to the harvest, and I’m not even sure they were mature when they started digging for them. We had a good few years’ harvesting, but being it was an 80 square foot area, I will return that square footage to more reliable foods like dry beans.
We are bringing tomatillos back into the garden. I’ve had terrible luck with them the past few years and took 2021 off them completely. But this winter we have been devouring salsa verde and so, naturally, it makes me want to attempt to can enough salsa for the year. I ordered a larger, hybrid variety called Super Verde from Johnny’s Seeds. I’m looking forward to hopefully turning a corner with this elusive tomato cousin turns into a vegetal jungle in our garden by August. Let’s hope for fruit this summer.
I also will be trialing more direct seeding this summer as I did the past few years to continue to question the need for indoor sowing my fall crops. If I can successfully transition more of our garden to direct-seeding, it will reduce our carbon footprint all around. I am truly curious to see what else besides Chinese cabbage and kohlrabi can succeed direct sown in mid to late summer here. I’ll keep you posted for sure.
Lastly, we need to make some changes to our new-to-us irrigation. Our landscaper’s irrigation crew used some very common boxes for the turnoff valves for each bed. What these are in reality are many little mouse hotels. I found corn stockpiled in one and a bed of gomphrena in another. Our cat has chased several field mice into these plastic burrows before the snow buried the rascals safely under their winter blanket. So we will be taking the time and probably hiring someone to help eliminate all of those boxes in our 15 or so raised beds.
