Good morning Saturday Morning Garden Blog-Friends! This cheerful tradition appears every Saturday morning at 9am Eastern, and lasts well into the week as conversations percolate. Anyone who likes to garden or talk about gardening or gardening-adjacent topics and whatever they devolve into… WELCOME!
It’s been a good week for new maps in Wisconsin! By which I mean, of course, that Mr. AnnieJo and I have just accomplished our annual spring-anticipating garden sketching, so we know what seeds to order now and plants to buy later and where we’re gonna put ‘em.
Today’s SMGB installment is a slice of how the process goes in one household, with no particular claim to expertise beyond lived experience of tending one particular property for twenty-plus years. Mostly it’s a conversation-starter — here’s how it goes with us, how does everyone else work it?
Mr. AnnieJo and I moved to the south-central Wisconsin property depicted in the cover photo in the fall of 1999, after having been apartment-dwellers for the first almost-6 years of our marriage. One of our wish-list items for the house-hunt was a yard with sunny space for a vegetable garden, and this place had it in spades! For some strange reason, our town has several blocks in which super-long yards back up to super-short yards, rather than splitting the difference. Our neighbor to the west, therefore, has a postage stamp yard. But we didn’t buy a postage-stamp, we bought a long one!
We rototilled up the first 21’x22’ garden in the spring of 2000, and planted it as you see below:
I have no idea where we got the seeds and plants that year — we don’t start seeds indoors, so the peppers and tomatoes have to be plant-purchases in our zone (5a at the time, barely 5b now). I also don’t quite know what prompted us to map the garden out. If my parents ever did maps for our Kansas garden, I didn’t know about it, and Mr. AnnieJo’s family didn’t have a big veggie-garden plot in Chicago.
I do remember that we didn’t know to cage our tomatoes that year. We naively thought we might be able to stake them up, but a bunch of them were indeterminate and we lost control fast, so they were ALL over the ground, and washing them up for canning was a mess and a half. We have improved our caging and canning chops greatly in the subsequent quarter-century!
Other things I do remember from all the way back then: the parsley was a bust. The okra was successful, but shaded everything north of itself once it got going. The cilantro was much appreciated by our pet rabbits, and self-seeded mightily. And I know the carrots were unimpressive because we tried for years and NEVER managed impressive carrots.
We have saved every year’s map since then, never since forgetting to put the date on, and it’s an interesting trip through memory lane to flip through them. I won’t inflict them all on you, but here is this year’s map that we just completed last weekend! (New maps, woo hoo!)
A number of things are different since that first foray. Top of the map is now west, and we expanded the garden by about ten feet to the east a few years back. We now grow a lot of kohlrabi in staggered plantings — Superschmelz variety by preference, though we’ve never tried to grow them to the fully-massive size — and a quite a few rows of soup beans that we store for the winter and shell as needed for chili or whatever. The cucumbers have moved to the side of the deck, and the okra is now in the flowerbed at the south side of the house.
We try to do at least something new every year. This year we are trying Cajun Jewel okra alongside of the Clemson Spineless that has been our standard, so we can compare/contrast in the same year. We also planted Spanish Roja garlic last fall instead of the German Porcelain we’d done the previous year, so we’ll see how that goes in the ancestral pickle crock this summer. It also still feels pretty new that we stopped rototilling a couple of years back and went with a wheat-straw mulching and only digging the rows we need. The mulch is on the main garden, the okra flowerbed, and the lettuce-and-arugula / then cucumbers next to the deck. We are LOVING not having to hoe the purslane weeds all the time. The one significant downside is that mama bunnies will fling themselves over fences to make their nests in the mulch! At least, that’s what we assume is happening, or else they’re squooshing their pregnant bunny-mama selves through impossible chinks in the fencing. We missed a nest in the okra bed last year, until low-slung leaves started disappearing and Mr. AnnieJo realized that there were critters implicated!
I’m surprised we haven’t received more seed-catalogs this year. Most of our ordering is from Seed Savers in Iowa. There used to be a Seed Savers outlet in our town, but it closed up shop. The other catalog below is from Jung’s, a Wisconsin-based outfit that has a sizeable store near us.
While it’s fun to refer to any-old-pile of seed and plant catalogs as “garden porn” in the middle of the winter, it’s hard to surpass the Seed Savers spring 2020 catalog for… err… rising to the occasion.
OK, now it’s your turn. Do you map, or just wing it? If you map, do you save your maps? What’s the sauciest catalog cover to hit your mailbox so far in 2024?
Let’s chat!!