The Good Life – March-April 2024

The first step in a successful garden
is deciding what is going to be
planted.
Even the mildest of winters has me looking towards
spring. Daydreams of sunshine, warm soil and
growing plants consume my thoughts during the late
winter. Fortunately, planning and preparation at this
time of year can pay dividends come summer.
What to Plant?
The first step in a successful garden is deciding what
is going to be planted. It seems like I get a new seed
and garden catalog nearly daily in my mailbox, and it
pays to sit down and leaf through each one.
There are some yearly standbys that my family has
found that they like best. Long ago I decided bush
beans weren’t for me, as I got tired of bending over
and picking the low hanging beans. Instead, I put up
a pair of sheep wire trellis for two rows of pole beans.
Pole beans grow up and vine around the wire, making
picking a breeze.
In years past, I had grown Blue Lake pole beans
exclusively. However, last year I decided to compare
them to Seychelles pole beans and discovered they
grew well and had a better flavor. This year I’ll be
ordering more of those!
My family eats a lot of potatoes, so each year I plant
nearly 160 hills. Yukon Gold is the mainstay, but I’ll
also put in reds and whites as well. I ordered my seed
potatoes through the mail last year, and on planting
day I ended up running short by ten seed spuds.
Luckily, I hadn’t cleaned out the potato storage rack
in the basement. Some of the spuds in storage had
started to grow eyes, and it was a piece of cake to split
the potatoes and finish my planting.
Order your seeds early, to make sure that they arrive in
plenty of time for planting. Store them in a cool, dark
place until planting day. Seeds can also be saved from
season to season in the same manner. I’ve recently
started seed saving. Seed saving is the process of
harvesting mature fruits and removing the viable seed
to plant the next year. In particular, there is an okra
variety that is very difficult to find from seed houses.
If it works, I’ll just keep a stash of viable seeds each
year to alleviate the need to find the seeds. After all, I
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