Gardening Goals

After a refreshing couple of days of introspection, life is feeling much brighter in my corner of the Knobs.  I feel more myself.   The kids finished up VBS Friday, so our pace of life will be much slower over the coming weeks.  Thank God for that!  Fun stuff from our mini-micro-farm: the first raspberries of the season!  We spied the first ripe yellow raspberry on Wednesday and the first black raspberry on Friday.  There is simply nothing more luscious than sweet raspberries, still warm from the sun.  Oh yes.

So, Amy over at Homestead Revival did a great post a few days ago about setting gardening goals...and that's something I've been working on over the past year too.  At first, when we started die-hard gardening, I wanted to plant everything!  A hundred tomatoes, purple beans, red carrots, a dozen different types of peppers, corn, lots of different lettuces.  And that was fun, but it sort of waylaid me from my goal of being able to grow and put up enough produce to last us through the following year.  There's only so many hours in the day and so many square feet to work with on our little homestead.  So this year we implemented our 'intentional gardening' plan. 

During the past winter, I decided to really dig down and get back to the basics.  Or as Captain Jack Sparrow would say:   "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do." 

-I can't grow enough fruit to keep us supplied all year.
-I can grow enough berries to make jams, preserves and jellies to last the winter.
-I can grow enough onions for an entire year.  Ditto garlic and maybe potatoes too.
-I can preserve enough tomatoes in the form of juice, salsa, dried tomatoes and stewed tomatoes  to eliminate the need for store-bought tomatoes.
-I can fit a few squash plants into the garden and have enough squash to last til spring.
-I can't grow good sweet corn, being surrounded by hundreds of acres of field corn.
-I can build a growing tunnel and supplement our root crops with fresh greens during the winter.

Savvy?  If you go into your gardening season with a clear idea of what you hope to achieve, oh it makes things so much easier.   

So this year, there are no purple beans.  Limited amounts of space for lettuce.  Eliminated the sweet corn.  Instead we're really concentrating on beans, onions, potatoes, carrots, squash, tomatoes, garlic and peppers.  All of which are staples of our everyday diet.  All of which can be preserved by some means, whether it be root cellaring, dehydration or canning.  All of which are becoming increasingly expensive at the grocery store.  If we have a decent harvest of these crops, it will fill in the bulk of our diet for the coming year and need only be supplemented with some fresh veggies for variety.   And that was the point of die-hard gardening to begin with, right?  Grow what we eat and then eat what we grow.

What kind of gardening goals/plans are you following this year?