2023, Family, Food, gardening, Seasons, Travel, Uncategorized

Garden Preparations

60 Comments

This weekend Husband and I plan to order our seeds for the garden. Husband has picked out three varieties of zinnia seeds. We will have our usual San Marzano 2 and Brandy Boy tomatoes which we will start in March. I found a source for the Doux D’Espana red sweet peppers. They are unavailable from our usual suppliers, so I hope the new source is reliable. I have no idea why they are in such short supply. We will also grow New Mexico Joe Parker Anaheim peppers.

Husband wants to plant turnips this year instead of kohlrabi. He will have them all to himself, as I don’t like turnips. I don’t like kohlrabi, either. He also wants to grow 12 heads of Alcosa savoy cabbage. We agreed on growing more Hamburg turnip-rooted parsley, as it is so good in soup and stock. We will grow our regular peas, Italian giant winter spinach, chard, Hidatsa pole beans and green beans, Italian parsley, and butternut squash. I am feeling tired already!

What are your summer garden plans? Any travel plans? What flowers do you like to grow? Any opinions about turnips?

60 thoughts on “Garden Preparations”

  1. Tomatotes, a few pots of herbs (basil, thyme, rosemary, sage) and maybe a bell pepper or two. We don’t garden much anymore. Should patronize our farmer’s market more often, but I’m usually golfing Saturday mornings in season (or going to book festivals or street fairs!). And my wife talks a good game about that but is such a homebody that merely going outside to work in the yard is a major mental undertaking for her. 😉

    Only travel plans are a BWCAW trip or two, maybe a driving vacation somewhere. Early Feb. we head to Tofte for a ski/snowshoe week on the North Shore. Snow base is fantastic up there. Now we just pray for no damn rain! Last week totally messed up the ski season. However, we got a good 6-8 inches of decent snow yesterday, so I’ll check out the trails today. Hopefully we’ll have a good week or more of training down here before heading up to the big time in the Arrowhead.

    Flowers? Ask my wife. I’m not good at remembering flower names. Irises for sure. Day lilies? Hydrangea and hostas. A bunch of others. We have mostly perennials, and in mid-July I’d match our backyard landscape with any garden in town.

    Turnips? Meh. I’ll pass. If they’re blended with potatoes, or roasted in a modest proportion to other root vegetables, I can tolerate them. But I’d never grow them or eat them as the featured vegetable in a meal.

    The same goes for parsnips.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  2. First, there’s some good music late night on yesterday’s blog…

    Husband wintered over some carrots, so first thing will be to get those out of the ground. I imagine next year’s will be much like this year, but with fewer winter squash perhaps, and this time I’d like to pay enough attention to harvest the herbs.

    I do like turnips ok if they’re combined with something else. I have a recipe from Celtic Folklore Cooking for something called Punchnep that has turnips, potatoes, butter, and apple, and a bit or cream that’s quite nice.

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  3. Husband says he is growing all white turnips that are somehow better than the purple topped ones. He also says turnips are more useful than radishes. I don’t like radishes either. I sure sound like a picky eater.

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      1. You know that, since I looked up that one Mighty Mouse clip a couple of days ago, I am now seeing more links to mighty mouse videos in my feed.

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  5. We have limited space for vegetables and herbs owing to limited sun (because of trees) in our back yard so we mainly grow those edible plants in raised beds placed optimally. Last fall we added a 3.5’ x 6’ raised bed and filled it with a good soil/compost mix, so we have a few more options.

    With such limited space, we go for high reward plantings like tomatoes and cucumbers, basil, thyme, tarragon and parsley. The perimeter of the yard is given mostly to perennials like hosta with some patches of flowers where the sun is good. Robin determines what she wants to go there.

    I don’t dislike any of the root vegetables but I don’t habitually use them either. Last summer we were given some beautiful young turnips. I used them raw, cut into matchsticks and added to a salad.

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  6. I’m good with turnips, although I will admit, usually in soups and stews.

    I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking ahead about my garden plans – probably because most of my adult life my garden plans have been very very fluid. Obviously I’ll have bales with a couple of tomatoes and basil and probably a hot pepper, although just one this year. I gave away so many hot peppers last year that people were running from me when they saw me. My “more flowers less grass” plan has pretty much picked at this point, so it’s only if some perennial really catches my eye will I be messing too much with the flowers.

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  7. I need to rething the goldenrod that I put in as a visual buffer between the back of our garden and the neighbor’s driveway.
    I would like more zinnias, and just need to remember to get them in in time. I also like morning glories climbing a fence, but routinely forget to put them in the past two summers..

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        1. It always seems as if the stuff you want to get rid of is the hardest. Speaking on behalf of my Creeping Charlie. I did, however manage to eradicate the ferns from the south side of my house after I moved in. I just don’t like ferns very much; I especially don’t like them when they’re sprouting out of the ground, they just seem like aliens from another world to me. It did take a couple years to get rid of them all, but I did.

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    3. I’ve put in morning glories more than once, but they haven’t very often stepped up to reseed themselves the following year. Not sure why. I suspect they don’t get enough sun, and the plants develop a “Why bother?” attitude.

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  8. Rise and Fall Off the Turnip Truck, Baboons,

    Some of us believe turnips (as well as parsnips and rutabagas) are the work of nasty chefs. Bah! Beets and kohlrabi, though, now THOSE are worth the time and effort.

    Flowers: I have the country garden perennials that I love: irises, peonies, echinacea, daisies,, etc. Then the things that act here in Zone 4/5 as annuals: glads, zinnias, petunias, plus anything else that strikes my fancy. I love a patch of flax in the garden somewhere because the color of the flowers is so beautiful (a lovely blue that waves in the wind).

    Plans: I want to add a raised bed the size that Bill added last year, each future year for awhile, so I don’t have to bend as much. Otherwise, I will grow the same old stuff. I got my 2023 Gardener’s Supply catalogue this week, so I have been browsing and dreaming.

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  9. More drought/heat tolerant flowers (portulacas or moss roses), shade tolerant flowers and fewer herbs ( we were overwhelmed by basil and sage last year (lots now in freezer or dried). Sun gold cherry tomatoes and fennel (1st time last year with good results)). Have to discipline self to do serial seeding of dill, fennel, cilantro so we have several “crops” that are at optimal stage. Discipline the arugula. No turnips tho young ones good with lots of butter and black pepper. Marigolds were huge last year! Hard to find shorter zinnias (we use raised beds). Have to order or shop for seeds now I guess.

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  10. We may travel to see our daughter in Tacoma, or go with our son, his family, and our daughter to Victoria, BC in July in lieu of getting together in December. Travel in aummer is hard when you have a vegetable garden.

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    1. Yes, asking someone to take care of a garden, especially one a extensive as yours, is asking for a huge favor. My friend Helen who used to live down the street from us, would routinely ask me to water her vegetable garden and plants on her deck when she’d take off for a week or two during the summer. This in addition to feeding the cat, take in the mail, and take care of her six chickens. I was free to harvest whatever I wanted from the garden plus eggs from the chickens. If the weather was hot and dry, the annuals in her flower pots and boxes all along the railing of her huge deck, required daily watering.

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    2. I have a real love-hate relationship with traveling in July. That’s the best time for my flowers, especially in the front. I hate leaving them.

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      1. remember, Clyde video cameras from around the world where he could check in in Sun Valley Idaho in the top of the pyramids in different places you could set up a camera in your front yard to view at different times of the day while you’re gone

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    3. can’t you find some community garden helpers at church to cover you for two weeks just with watering and I would assume that your weeding could be put on hold just gives them a checklist of what to do to what plants have them check in with you daily and showing you that they’ve done it and see if there are any questions and enjoy that wonderful vacation on Victoria Island there’s no place better

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  11. Turnips. Aren’t those the things that taste like dirt? Oh wait, no, that’s beets.

    I don’t know about a garden yet. Last summer we had just decided not to, which turned out to be a good thing considering. And haven’t even thought about it yet this year.
    I can start a straw delivery list anytime you want though. I was thinking about that yesterday.

    We haven’t been anywhere since 2019. Daughter keeps saying we need a vacation. Coordinating schedules is the problem. I have the summers off ‘work’ work, but that’s Kelly’s busy time. So it’s hard. I’ve been joking we’re going to Iowa for vacation this summer. I really do want to tour the John Deere works in Waterloo. Anywhere not here is a vacation!

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  12. I don’t do turnips don’t do rutabagas don’t do call Mari my father-in-law makes great pickled beets. He also does horseradish and it isn’t that I like or dislike turnips rutabagas or calamari. I just don’t ever have a Cajun to run across it and I guess not thinking about it means that it doesn’t get into my shopping cart to turn into something at home. Is it any good?

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      1. i was thinking kohlrabi but between my not eating much of it and my brain starting to turn to mush calamari got named by mistake

        i ordered it once in a restaurant as an appitizer thinking was like deep fried pickles or kohlrabi and as i bit into it my face kind of screwed up because it tasted more animal than verge and my brother said hey what is this it tastes kind of like shellfish
        so we asked and found out it didn’t work on my veggie diet and it made brothers throat do his allergy reaction

        me and calamari have got history

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        1. Glad I asked.

          OT – I’m feeling bit of relief from the knee pain. Had a shot of Kenalog-40 and lidocane into it late this afternoon. It may take up to a week before it fully kicks in, but it’s better already. 🙂

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  14. I like root vegetables of all sorts. Turnips are good. Love rutabagas. When I think about growing root vegetables, this always comes to mind. I’ve posted it before, so skip if you’ve had your fill of it….

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  15. I love hearing about garden plans. I am working on a “less is more” theory this year and will be establishing a few berry bushes and fruit trees at my new property. I will go light on the vegetable garden since there is a lot of site prep this year.

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