Garden 2025 Update #1: Planning It All Out

• Garden 2025 Update #1:

While all my beds are covered in a thick blanket of snow, I'm already tossing around some fun new ideas and some basic garden planning for this year.

A big part of that is doing a winter inventory on all things homegrown & home canned. I've adopted the motto to "grow what you eat" to keep it as simple as I can, so it's been a matter of fine tuning that each year when I take inventory of my shelf space and all the things I've put up from the garden.  

It doesn't take too long into winter to notice what there's too much of, and also notice what there's not enough of. This can change each and every year for many reasons, so keeping track and updating every winter is a very helpful habit to get started planning the garden for spring.

•  While I haven't officially planned 2025 garden yet, I've got a good idea of how it will look since I decided to simplify things considerably for this year.  There will be three, new 8' beds this year (Lord willing!) for cucumbers and strawberries so that will help keep things a little more organized. The 16 feet of cucumber space was flooded badly last year and I lost all but one plant.  So this year I'll be building two, 8 foot long raised beds for all my cucumbers to prevent that from happening again in the future.  I have strawberry plants all over the garden and even on the deck, so they'll all be moved to their own dedicated raised bed as well, just in front of the blackberries. 

•  I have decided I can't give up on growing onions from seed just yet, even though it's been a utter disaster for several years running now. I bought Walla Walla sweets & planted them on the 15th. Many have germinated already and I'm determined to see them grow well. So far the chipmunks have defeated me every year but... I'm not giving up just yet. I'll be sorting through several different options of "chipmunk proofing" and hopefully find one that works well for my situation. 

•  On a whim, I'm trying winter sowing for the first time. I have two bins outside now and plan to put another one out soon. Winter sowing this year will be: Purple Coneflower, Yarrow, Milkweed, Sunflowers & Chamomile.  Joyful Farmer on YT has some great videos on this subject if you'd like to give it a go yourself.

• I had so much fun with it last year and was so happy with the results that "beautifying my space" will definitely continue this garden season. 💖 Here's one addition that will be going into the garden this year (I'm growing some of this already, but there's plenty of room for many more!) 12 Mosquito Repellent Plants - Plant these 12 plants in your garden for their colorful and fragrant display, plus their ability to keep uninvited bugs out.

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you're encouraged by what you've read here, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel welcome to leave a comment. 😊