Easy Street Gardening
Weekly, step-by-step guidance for gardening on the front range.
Each week, this newsletter will contain three sections:
How things are going
I will share an update on my garden as a point of reference for how my weekly tasks are adding up and looking.
What to do this week
Here I will present the 3 - 5 things I am planning or doing this week.
Resources
A deeper dive into information and perspectives that are inspiring or informing my gardening.
If you are coming to this newsletter mid-season, please take a look at the posts from the past few weeks to get a sense of context for where we are at this week!
How things are going:
January is over! We are one month into 2024, building a strong foundation to have an easy and productive gardening season. At the end of each month this year, I want to take time to reflect on what we’ve been working on, as well as review what needs to get done in the coming month.
One of the reasons I started this substack is that I’ve heard enough of my friends talk about how they often get their gardens off to a good start, only to lose track of things after about a month or so. A few wilted plants creates a downward spiral of discouragement and further neglect. I think this is a fairly common experience. There is excitement and momentum in planning and planting, but then comes the watching, waiting, and tending, which can be easy to put off.
I want to help prevent this from happening, and I don’t think gardeners like my friends are that far off from having a successful season! The barrier to get over that mid-season slump is not as high as it might seem, and my hope is that a friendly weekly reminder of things to do will help anyone get past these small friction points that can make or break a garden.
All that being said, what have we done so far this year?
Create a space for yourself to track your gardening goals for the year. Dedicate a notebook or a digital document to your 2024 garden. We will return to this planning space throughout the year, so keep it handy.
Now is the time! Make some gardening resolutions for yourself, and write them down.
Do you want to add to your gardening space?
Grow more food this season than you did last?
Start your own seedlings, rather than buying starts from the store?
Grow a wider variety?
Add new features to your garden, like a trellis or drip irrigation?
Or maybe, you’re just getting started and you want to learn and have some fun.
Start translating your gardening resolutions into more concrete goals. Write these down in your garden planner. I encourage you to make a long list, and try to be comprehensive.
What do you want your experience gardening to look like each month of the season?
What do you want your gardening process to look like?
Think about your garden infrastructure, the plants you’d like to grow, any troubles you’d like to address, and new things you’d like to try.
Start aligning your goals to more concrete plans. Ask yourself:
What seeds do you have and what seeds will you need to buy?
How many of each plant will you want to buy later in the spring?
Where will these plants go in your beds?
Are your beds big enough to allow you to achieve your goals? If not, what plans can you make to add or organize them accordingly?
If you’re going to grow your own seedlings, now is a good time to take inventory of your supplies and setup. While we are still a month or so away from starting most seedlings, if you’re interested in starting peppers, I advise that you plan to plant those seeds within a few weeks. They take a long time to grow.
If you’ve never started seedlings before, it’s a fun way to get into the gardening season earlier than the spring! The investment can be relatively small, if you want to just try it out. Think about what your next few months are going to look like and whether you’ll be able to take care of seedlings through the spring planting. I’ll share more resources next week and the coming weeks on how to start seedlings inside.
Continue to refine your gardening goals for the year. January went by in a blur, and you don’t want to find yourself saying the same thing when it comes time to start planting in your garden in May. Setting goals now will help make sure you stay ahead of all the preparations you need to do to achieve them!
Make a garden map for your spring garden. These maps can be drawn, made in excel, or in a gardening app. Having a map is a useful tool for planning, because it gives you a concrete sense of the plants you’ll need to achieve your goals.
Consider starting some peppers seedlings or other slow growing seedlings. Peppers are particularly fun to start on your own because there is such a wide variety that aren’t sold at your local nurseries.
We’ve moved from resolutions, to concrete goals, to plans, to maps, as well as beginning to order seeds and start seedlings needed for the coming year. That’s a lot for just the first month of the year! If you haven’t done all of these things, no worries. You still have plenty of time to get to them before the spring season begins, but remember, the more incrementally you spread out these activities over many weeks and months, the more manageable the work can be.
The pepper seedlings haven’t sprouted yet, but I’ve moved them to a warmer part of the house. Hopefully that will accelerate their germination. This week, I am continuing to refine my garden map, and I am starting to use it to plan out when I need to have seedlings and seeds ready to put into the ground. Here is a walk through of how I’m thinking about this:
Planning and Planting Seedlings 🌱 - Watch Video
And here is the link to the Johnny’s Seed Starting Calculator:
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-library/seed-planting-schedule-calculator.html
My goal is to use the maps and the seedling starting dates as a rough guideline for myself, allowing some flexibility in exactly when I start the seedlings. You definitely don’t need a strict schedule with gardening, but having some timeline mapped out is very helpful for making sure you don’t miss early spring and summer planting windows.
What to do this week:
Here’s what to do:
Read through material on companion planting. I can’t recommend it enough. Taking some time to intentionally mix together your vegetable plants with herbs and flowers goes a long way to reducing the amount of work you’ll need to do this summer! This can help you develop your garden maps.
Take some time to reflect on your planning so far and how you are feeling about the upcoming season. What is making you most excited? What is filling you with a small amount of anxiety? How might taking some steps now help you feel more confident about getting started in the spring?
There’s still time to order seedlings from me for the spring. Put in some orders for varieties that you won’t be able to find at your local garden centers! I am happy to talk with you about different varieties, so please feel free to reach out!
Next week:
Starting more seedlings, ordering more seeds, succession planting planning
Resources:
Resource 1
Johnny’s actually has a lot of resources for planning your garden. They are worth taking a look at to see if any of them will be helpful to your own planning.