Garden Goals: Planning Your Garden for Success

Winter is finally coming to an end as snow melts and song birds start singing, which means spring (and your garden) are right around the corner! But even though it may be a bit premature to start planting, it’s certainly time to start planning out your garden.

If you’re new to the gardening game, it can be overwhelming to think about a whole season at once. So before you purchase any seeds or seedlings, think about your garden goals: do you want your garden to grow a lot, be experimental, pleasing to the eyes, or be diverse?

Growing for Abundance

Even if you only have a small raised bed garden, choosing a few specific crops can still yield a large bounty. Think about varieties of crops that have smaller, but more productive fruits. We recommend that the varieties you pick be hardy and known for their productivity. Especially if you haven’t gardened much, avoid high risk crops like broccoli and brussels sprouts, which are prone to diseases and pests.

Growing to Learn

These set of suggestions will be helpful for garden beginners and students. Reliable and low risk plants will yield a successful garden for learners. Letting some plants to go past their prime allows you to see to production of mature seeds. For an exciting experience, try growing plants where different parts are edible: carrots for roots, broccoli for buds, tomato for fruits, nasturtiums for flowers, sunflowers for seeds, lettuce for leaves.

Growing for Aesthetics

Edible gardens are amazing because you can arrange the plants to your liking, even going so far . As soon as production decreases, we suggest removing old, leggy tomato or cucumber vines. Try planting already established plants. Be creative by playing with the color, different leaf sizes, and textures, and perhaps try incorporating perennial and native elements to make your very own potager, or French kitchen garden.

Growing for Variety

Tomatoes might get a lot of credit, but they aren’t the only heirloom varieties. There are melons, lemons, cucumbers, and rare peppers to name some, and Green City Growers plants a lot of interesting and unique crops. Each has different weights and their own unique tastes, and many cannot be found in conventional markets because they are too delicate to ship. We suggest to experiment with varieties that are disease and pest resistant..

Once you’ve figured out your reasons for growing this season, it’s time to start choosing your crops, and get planting! Download our crop mapping tool for an easy guide to successful gardening.

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