YORKTON - It’s about seventeen weeks or so till the week of the May long weekend, the traditional “planting” weekend, although it could come a little sooner depending on the weather! I don’t know about you, but I find that the weeks seem to go by very quickly, so that new garden season will be here before we know it!
Okay, so just for fun, let’s make a “garden list” of what we want to plant this year. This isn’t our fantasy list where we go through the seed catalogues and say, “I want this…and this…oh, and for sure, this!” We’d all need acres of land and a team of assistants to weed and maintain it all! But let’s make our ‘for real’ list, of what we actually can use and enjoy.
I have a 2025 seed catalogue in front of me, and because our space is limited, each page that has perhaps a dozen offerings might yield only one ‘yes’ on our garden list. We plant our favorites, and they are pretty basic: beans, lettuce, onions, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers. We don’t have room for potatoes, and don’t want to give up space to things like broccoli or cauliflower and the friends that they bring to the garden.
So now as I look at the seed catalogue, I recall the successes of last year, and the sometimes-accidents that lead to interesting plantings! Mom always planted lettuce as a ‘border’ in her garden, and we have done the same things for years and years. Works great, looks great, and is easy to reach from the lawn.
Beans are a favorite, yellow in particular, and we still enjoy the Royal Burgundy purple beans. We like to try speckled beans sometimes, not so much for serious use, but just because they look so very lovely in the garden. We read about one variety called “Red Noodle”, 80 days, that produces two foot long red beans! That would be fun!
I think we might like to try some container cucumbers, just as an interesting experiment. From what I have read, the smaller, more compact cucumbers have more of a bushy shape and don’t sprawl all over like their garden cousins.
After a break of several years, we started planting carrots again, and have had much nicer carrots. Same location, but we work hard at amending our soil, so maybe they like that new and improved soil! We planted Yellow Detroit beets last year, they looked nice and tasted fine, but not sure if they will make the final cut this year. Swiss chard is a given, usually as an ornamental because not everyone in the family like this vegetable, but they are truly a versatile plant to eat and use as a backdrop of color at the edge of the garden.
Love peppers, but we don’t start them from seed. We always like bell peppers, (love the orange and yellow), and try to include the cayenne, they look beautiful!
Tomatoes are always a family favorite, and though we don’t have the variety Mom used to have in her beautiful garden, our garden would not be complete without them. After last year’s adventure in the raised bed, we will not plant any tomato that does not have a tag, no matter how cute it looks in its pot! A raised bed success story was the pumpkin we planted right at the edge. It quietly cascaded into our roses, and we did not realize till fall that we had such a lovely crop of pumpkins! A happy surprise!
That’s almost our list, how about yours? We haven’t even talked about containers yet, and planning for them is great fun because so many plants do so well in containers, but we’ll save that for when we have tea next time. Thank you to our friends at YTW for their fine work. Gardeners’ visit the hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca and have a great week!
