Garden Goals For 2022

It’s that time of year when gardeners are checking their mailboxes excitedly every single day. We’re all probably resembling Ralphy waiting for our Little Orphan Annie Decoder pins!

As the catalogs come in, you’ll find us checking our seed inventories (if we’re trying to behave before ordering), and scouring over all the new things we’ve never heard of or tried to find new varieties to add to our gardens this year.

Things we’ll repeat this year in our garden:

We will definitely be trellising our tomatoes again using the Florida weave method, like we did in 2021. We’ve never had such a beautiful aisle of tomato plants as we did last year. It was easier than many other methods we have tried, plants were easy to pick off, and it was also easy to pull up the plants in the Fall to let the green ones finish ripening in the garage on the vine out of the impending frost.

We will be planting all the same varieties of all the different crops we had planted last year, and will be adding a few new things to the mix, which will be listed below in this article. While I’d like to say that I subscribe to the idea of crop rotation, I’ll admit that I’m not that much of a purist when it comes to our yearly garden plan. We will likely swap out where a couple things were planted, but the majority of things will be going back into the plots in the same areas they did so well in last year. I’m in the camp that feels like if you are amending your soils to keep nutrients flowing and haven’t had a problem with certain types of pests or disease in an area, there isn’t a huge need for crop rotation on a home-garden scale.

Changes we’ll make this year:

One change will be to actually PLANT PUMPKINS – I didn’t get my seeds in the ground early enough last year, so we ended up getting pumpkins from some amazing local friends instead. While that was fun and I was glad I wasn’t battling squash bugs on them all year, I really did miss watching them grow and being constantly surprised when I found a new one hiding under the foliage.
The second change we’ll be making is to make the wood chips a lot deeper in a few places throughout the garden where we’re still battling some hefty weed pressure. The deep wood chips have basically eradicated the heavy weed pressure we were experiencing before we transitioned to using them in all our paths. The trade-off of that is that the squash bugs have endless places to hide and eggs to overwinter for the next season, so take that into consideration as well.

Not specifically related to our garden, one large change I’ll be making this year is getting my Master Gardener Certification from Utah State University. I’m so excited to dive into all the different aspects of the program and learn even further about botany, entomology, weed science, irrigation, integrated pest management, landscape design, and soil science – among other things.

Things I’d like to focus on this year:

I’d really like to focus on a more developed herbal and medicinal garden both at our family garden, and at my own home. I’m continually learning more and more about the need to have many of these things right at out fingertips, and I’m excited to find areas to nurture these things for all our health and culinary needs.

New seeds/plants we may try:

Now, if I typed out all the new seeds I’d like to try this year, I’d be typing for days – and I’d also have to take out a 2nd mortgage to get them all. So here are a few I hope to get to try out this year. We are in gardening zone 5b (if you want more information on gardening zones, visit this post), so some of these might not produce before our first frost, but I still love to try new things and seeing how far I can push our growing zone without the need of a greenhouse or cold frames quite yet:

*Will need to be container-grown to be overwintered indoors

What are your gardening plans?

I’d love to know what you’re planning on keeping the same, and what you’ll be changing or adding for the 2022 gardening season, so don’t forget to leave a comment below!

If you’re new to gardening and don’t know where to start on your own in-ground garden, don’t forget to check out the free e-book on how to get started on a garden of your own WITHOUT overwhelm! If you’d like 1 on 1 mentoring about your specific hurdles in your garden or food preservation journey, you can book a 60 minute session with me here to get a solid plan for 2022.

Thank you for coming along on this journey with me! Here’s to growing an amazing garden, and an even more amazing personal journey in 2022!