Keep a Seed Inventory

Gardeners who plant from seed, generally have some seed left at the end of the season. Knowing what kind of seed, how much, and where it is stored will help you plan your seed order for the new year. Having an inventory of your seeds could save you money by not buying more than you need, and lessen frustration when it comes time to plant, since you will know what you have and how much.  If you store your seeds in more than one place, indicate where your seeds are.

For many years, I used a piece of notebook paper for my seed inventory. I listed all the seeds I had on hand and made columns for how much, the source of the seeds, and the year they were bought, or the year saved if I grew them out myself. Remember, that was before computers were routinely used in the home and things weren’t so easily copied. Eventually, I developed a seed inventory form. You can see the heading for that here and you will find the form on the CD that comes with my garden plan DVD. It is also in my book Grow a Sustainable Diet. There is a link in the book that allows you to download PDFs of all the forms shown. Now I print off as many copies of the seed inventory form as I need. This year it was 11 pages! When you save seeds it is easy to accumulate a lot of seeds from different years.

A coffee filter was used for this germination test with cowpeas.

I try to inventory my seeds before the end of the growing year. This year I managed to get that completed in early December, but if times are busy, it is January before it happens. If you haven’t inventoried the seeds you have, do it now before you order new ones. As you go through your seeds, purge the ones that you know you will never plant or that you know have poor germination. Now would be a good time to do a germination test on the questionable varieties in your stash. If the ones you intend to get rid of pass the germination test, consider taking them to a seed swap, donating them to a seed library, or passing them on to your friends or new gardeners. If they don’t pass the germination test, throw them in the compost or your chicken pen, providing they are not treated, of course.

As you can see, my seed inventory has columns for Crop, Variety, Amount, Source, (empty), Don’t Buy, Do Buy, Source, Amount, and $. If you take your time with this form, you could use it to develop your seed order as you go. The Don’t Buy column is probably not necessary and you could use that space for something else. The column I left empty is sometimes used to record the days to maturity of the variety. It facilitates garden planning if that information is at your fingertips. That column could also be used to record the germination rate, if a germination test is done that year. If you know you are short on something, check the Do Buy column. Later you can go back, armed with your seed catalogs, and put in the amount of seeds you will need to buy, where you will get them and how much they will cost. Imagine, all your seed records in one place!

I list the vegetables, then the flowers and herbs, then the grains and cover crops. Each section has the crops in alphabetical order, making it easier to find things later. Each variety of a crop that I have seeds for is shown and sometimes I leave spaces for additional varieties that I intend to order. When my seed order comes in, I add those varieties to the crop inventory, and put the new seeds with my stored seeds so everything is in one place. If you don’t get around to actually recording your new acquisitions on the inventory form, put the seed order form in your garden notebook with your seed inventory.

The Garden Notebook! I assume you have put together a binder with tabs for your garden map, plant and harvest record sheets, seed inventory, and other important information. My DVD Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan takes you through what is necessary to keep your garden records organized. You can refresh your memory be reading my blog post Keeping Garden Records.

I refer to my seed inventory throughout the year. It is easy to forget what you have. A seed inventory helps to ensure that the seeds you have purchased or saved will get planted. The seed catalogs have arrived and can be alluring, causing you to order more than you need. Before you order seeds, make your garden plan for the year so you will know just how much you need of each crop according to the space in your garden. Actually, I begin planning my garden in the fall for the coming year so that I know which cover crops go where, in preparation for the main crop in the spring and summer. Start wherever you are and go from there.

Wishing you well on your 2017 gardening year.

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Becoming a Market Gardener

Once you have gotten quite good at producing food for your table, it is natural to think of providing for others. You could casually share with your neighbors and the local food bank, but many want to take it further and exchange their extra veggies for cash. If that is where your thoughts have been leading you, I would like to offer some things for you to carefully consider before becoming a market gardener. There is a big difference between doing what you love when you have the time and turning doing what you love into a business. During my time as a market grower I grew and sold a lot of lettuce. This photo shows me washing it for a restaurant delivery.

On January 29 I gave the presentation Scaling Up from Homestead to Market Garden at the Virginia Biological Farming Conference. It was well received and people who heard me speak approached me that evening and the next day to thank me for the presentation. Those who had already been selling said that my points hit home. I became an organic gardener so that I would have a healthy family. In order to also have a healthy community I became a market gardener in 1992 and sold to area restaurants. The farmers market network was not yet established at that time. In 1997-98 I had a small CSA in addition to the restaurant sales and in 1999 I was a founding farmer at our local farmers market. I left selling produce and eggs for others after the 2001 season to concentrate on teaching and researching so that I could put more knowledgeable consumers and producers at the markets.

Selling to others on a regular basis highlights the need for good record keeping. You need to plan for how much to grow and to plan for how much money it will bring to your business. No matter how good you are at growing some crops, such as broccoli and cabbage, the income from the same amount of other crops, such as specialty lettuce mixes, will exceed it every time. If you have already been a home gardener and have kept some records of your yields you will be able to anticipate how much you can produce from the space you have. Keep in mind, however, that if you have to break new ground for this endeavor, it may not be as productive as the garden you have been building the soil in for years. Some crops might surprise you. Onions turned out to be a good crop, as well as potatoes, winter squash and garlic—all crops that are not as labor intensive as lettuce.

You need to know what your crops will sell for before you even grow them. Notice what they are being sold for in area grocery stores and farmers markets. Start now and make a chart of the stores and markets in your area with a list of vegetables you might want to sell. Record the prices for them each week throughout the year, noting if they are sold by the piece, pound, bunch, etc. If by the piece, how many pieces make a pound? If by the bunch, how many items make a bunch and how heavy is it? Also record the origin of each crop. This list will be invaluable to you as you move forward with your plans.

Potatoes in wooden boxes were sold by the pound. Small potatoes in pasteboard containers were sold by container.

Although prices might fluctuate in the greater marketplace, I decided on a price that was fair for both myself and for my customers for each crop and kept it the same throughout the season. That said, there are a number of things you could do to vary the price. If you have an abundance of something, you could offer a larger quantity of seconds at a cheaper price per pound. I sorted my potatoes and displayed the smaller ones in pint and quart containers at a higher price per pound than the larger potatoes that were sold by the pound. The price displayed for the containers was by the container size, not by the pound. Nevertheless, the prices remained the same for the abundant seconds (cucumbers), the pints and quarts of potatoes, and everything else for the duration of that season.

Know your produce. People often comment on how much more expensive the colored peppers are in the grocery store compared to the green ones. Well, you need to leave the green peppers on the plant for a few additional weeks to ripen to red, yellow, or orange and anything can happen during that time. I priced my colored peppers at twice as much per pound as the green ones and had no complaints. Besides the prices, you need to know the nutritional value of everything you have and what to do with it in the kitchen. The more information you can pass on to the buyers, the more sales you will make.

I sold a limited variety of produce to the restaurants; primarily leaf and romaine lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and onions and the chefs did not need me to suggest what to do with it. For the farmers market I needed a larger variety of things for my booth and my customers welcomed my suggestions. The greater population has gotten away from cooking from scratch at home and need some instruction as they move back to that. If you package all the ingredients for salsa, for example, plus the recipe, many are more likely to try it. Packaging all the colors of the peppers you have together will entice your customers to buy the package, rather than just the one or two peppers that they had in mind.

Your passion and enthusiasm will go a long way to making sales, but keep in mind that you need to tend to your family first—and to your soil. If you feel you can grow more than you already do, maybe it is time to expand what you are growing for your own table, rather than grow for others. How much of your staple crops, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, and grains do you grow? Are you growing enough cover crops to feed back the soil and provide all your own compost?

The first DVD I produced was Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden and I was excited that I could show people how to manage cover crops in their gardens with hand tools. I knew it would be a tremendous help to small scale market gardeners—those gardeners moving from growing for their family to growing for others. The garden plan DVD followed which shows how to put together a notebook with your complete plan. I wanted gardeners to have a good foundation to help them plan to feed their families and others. Through my teaching I met folks who were ready to jump into growing for the markets with little experience of getting their hands dirty, let alone an understanding of what is going on in the soil when things grow and in our bodies when we eat the food. By the way, you will get dirty, sweaty, and tired. So tired that you will fall into bed at night thoroughly exhausted, only to get back up early in the morning to do it all again. It is not an occupation for the fainthearted.

I want gardeners to understand all of that before they ramp up to feed others. I expanded on what was in the DVDs when I wrote Grow a Sustainable Diet. It includes an additional worksheet (How Much to Grow), and information on nutrition, food processing and storage, garden washing stations, sheds, fences, and more on garden rotations with cover crops. With that book and the DVDs it is like taking a class from me. No matter how many people you are growing for or how much land you are using, my teaching materials apply. I’ve been talking here about determining how much money you could make, but sometimes the profit in this is not so much about the money you make, but the life you make. You become an integral part of the community around you and you can’t put a dollar value on that.

 

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Make an Annual Garden Report

Here it is– a new year and time to plan your new garden. Before you do that, however, I urge you to think about last year’s garden. Most likely, if you are reading this you probably did some sort of planning last year. That’s what my DVD Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan is all about. In the DVD I show you how to put together a notebook with your complete garden plan. It even comes with a CD with all the worksheets I talk about, such as a Seed Inventory, How Many Seeds and Plants Needed, Plant / Harvest Times, and a Plant / Harvest Schedule. My book Grow a Sustainable Diet has an additional worksheet—How Much to Grow. It is great to work up a plan, but you might be like someone I met recently who put her plan together in a notebook, just like I advise, but neglected to keep track of things afterward. That is a great start and all is not lost. Even though you didn’t write it down, surely you remember something that happened through the year. Take the time now to note the highlights of 2015 and make a report of your gardening year. Then, file it away with the garden plan you made for 2015 for reference.

For many years my garden plan consisted mainly of my garden maps, the one I made showing what I intended to plant where and when, the Actual version that showed what actually happened, and the Amendments version that showed what amendments were added to each bed and when. It is the Actual version that will help you plan this year’s garden. If you completed it you will know what was in each bed throughout the year and when it was planted, particularly, what is in there now; but the subject of garden maps is a whole other post. Once I became a certified Ecology Action GROW BIOINTENSIVE Mini-farming Teacher I had to keep many other records and send them to John Jeavons each year, accompanied by a letter that explained what went on that year. It always gave the highs and lows of the year, what I was particularly working on, etc. It is that letter that I want you to write for yourself about your 2015 garden.

If you didn’t get past the initial plan, just making that plan should be considered a high. Not following through would probably be considered a low, but I’m sure there were extenuating circumstances. You should note those. It might be that you took a vacation and never quite got back to garden recordkeeping when you returned. Births, deaths, marriages, and divorces pretty much serve to get even the best planners off track, as do the activities of your children and parents. Building projects around your homestead might keep you occupied, and then there is the weather, which is always a good excuse for messing up your plans. If any of those things happened to you this year, they should be in your annual garden report. Although many of the things I mentioned cannot be foreseen or avoided, things like vacations can. If your vacation seems to coincide with crucial harvest times each year, change your vacation time for this year or time your plantings so their harvests will not conflict.

Thinking through the year will help you put things in perspective. If there is something you wished you could do better, such as fill in your Actual Garden Map as the season progresses, you might decide that will be a priority in 2016. What crops were you especially proud of? Even if you didn’t keep yield records you should have an idea if you were pleased or not with the harvest of most of the things you planted. Your pleasure or displeasure could be with the yield, taste, color, or whatever other traits you remember. Put that in your garden report. If you wished you had planted more or less of something, besides mentioning it in your report, make a note to change the amount planted in 2016.

What did you do differently last year? Did you try any new varieties or new ways of managing your tried-and-true varieties? What amendments did you bring in to your garden, if any? What did you use as mulch and where did it come from? Write about those kinds of things.

Leatherwing on mint

I hope you took photos of your garden through the year. It is amazing how things will look to you at another time. Having that visual record helps you to remember what was going on. Besides the plants and overall garden throughout the season, take photos of things you built or tools you used. Also, take photos of the insects and other wildlife in your garden. As you can see, I found leatherwings in my mint last summer. If you look closely, you might be surprised to see just how many varieties of insect helpers you have in your garden. This can all go in your annual garden report.

If you depend on the computer to store your photos, make sure to file them somewhere, hopefully in a file titled for that year, such as “2015 Garden”, with copies filed in appropriate files, such as “insects”, “crops”, or “tools”. Some people like to put photo books together online and then receive copies of the actual book. You could document all sorts of things in a book like that. Maybe that could be a project for your children to do, compiling information throughout the gardening season with that in mind.

Through the years I have often referred back to the letters that accompanied my records to John Jeavons and Ecology Action. Your annual garden report will reflect more than what is on record sheets. It can tell of the excitement, disappointment, discoveries, and enlightenment you experienced throughout the year. So, before you plan for 2016, take time to reflect on 2015. By writing an annual report, you can better direct your actions for planning this year’s garden.

 

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How Much To Grow

How Much to Grow is the title of Chapter 4 in Grow a Sustainable Diet. If your garden is small and whatever you get from it is a welcome addition to your table, you might not be concerned with exactly how many pounds are produced of anything. You are just happy to have homegrown food in your meals. If you want to be able to predict how much your harvest will be so you can plan to have a certain amount for your family to eat, you can put pencil to paper now and do some calculating.

butternut squash

Chapter 4 contains a worksheet (you see part of it here) to help with those calculations. (There is a link in the book that will take you to PDFs of all the worksheets so you can print them out.) Whether you are trying to decide how much to grow for your family or for your CSA, the process is the same. Decide how much you want for each week and how many weeks you will be eating it, or in the case of a CSA, how many weeks you need to put it in the CSA boxes. If you have no idea how many pounds of something you need, go to the grocery store and pick out a reasonable quantity for a meal in the produce department. Weigh it on the scale that is right there. Multiply that weight by how many meals per week that item will supply and you have the pounds needed per week. The number of weeks you want to eat something could be only the weeks it is fresh from the garden, or every week of the year if you are preserving for eating out of season. Rather than the weight, you may need to know the count; how many of something you will have, such as butternut squash. Sometimes you can find that information in the seed catalogs, and sometimes not. From my experience, I know that I can expect about 4 squash per plant. If the catalog doesn’t have that information for the variety you choose, read the description of all the varieties, as well as the specifics for each crop to get an estimate.

Finding out how much is needed is the easy part. You need to know how much you can grow in your area and pounds/100 ft² is a good universal measure to use. How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons has Master Charts that can help you with that. The Master Charts have columns for Biointensive yields and for the US Average for each crop. Use those figures as guidelines. Your yield will depend on many factors, including your soil, climate, and management style. You might already know how much you can harvest in the area planted. If not, this exercise should encourage you to record your harvests this year, at least for the crops you are most interested in.

Mississippi Silver cowpeas

Remember the charts are only guidelines. For the Biointensive yield, the Master Charts give three numbers; the beginning yield that you could expect getting at some time, the intermediate yield that could be reached after good soil building, and a high yield that few might reach. The Biointensive yield of winter squash is shown as 50/100/350. There is no US Average shown in the Master Charts, but my research determines that number to be 49.5 pounds/100 ft². The target yield I use for butternut squash is 150 pounds/100 ft². I have reached that yield and sometimes higher in my garden. For cowpeas, the Biointensive yield is 2.4/4/5.9. The US Yield of cowpeas isn’t shown, but through my research I’ve determined it to be 2.6 pounds. I live in a great climate for cowpeas and have found I can use 5 pounds/100 ft² as my target yield. On the other hand, I would love to plan on getting 100 pounds/100 ft² regularly with my potatoes, but the voles keep the yield below that. The Biointensive yield for potatoes is 100/200/780 and the US Average is 84.2. Depending on the variety, I don’t always reach the low Biointensive yield of 100 pounds for tomatoes. The US Average for tomatoes is 67 pounds for fresh and 153.4 pounds for processing tomatoes per 100 ft².

From your garden map you will know how much space you have available. My post Making a Garden Map can help you with that. It becomes a balancing act, deciding how much space to allot for each crop. Having a target yield makes planning easier. Your target yield may need to be adjusted from year to year, but at least you have someplace to start from. Between cover crops and food crops, plan to have your beds full all year. Immediately after your early spring crops are harvested, plant the next crop. Leaving the beds empty is an invitation for Mother Nature to plant her favorites, which we tend to think of as weeds.

The rest of the page of the How Much to Grow worksheet that you don’t see is a space for comments and three columns for the amount of calories, protein, and calcium per pound of food. It is always good to leave space for comments—something about that crop you want to remember. Since I keep records for my certification as a GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Minifarming teacher, I am interested in the amount of calories, protein, and calcium in each crop. There might be other things that you want to record in those additional columns.

Use this information to enhance what you are doing, but don’t let it overwhelm you. Keep track of what you can. As you find you have more questions, add the appropriate recordkeeping to your system. Most importantly—have fun in your garden this year!

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Keeping Garden Records

The seed catalogs have arrived and as you recover from the holidays you are getting excited about this year’s garden. I always have the best garden in January—meaning the one I plan in January. Things don’t always go as planned, but that’s to be expected. There are lots of garden books on your bookshelves, the library and the bookstore to guide you, but did you ever wish there was a garden book written just for you? It would be specific to your garden with your own crops, varieties, planting times and records of yields. Although it will take a little work on your part, you can have exactly that.

Fortunately for you, now is the best time to start writing that book. Actually it is a notebook you will be putting together, unless you prefer to put everything on the computer. I prefer pencil and paper myself and a book that I can hold in my hands (while sitting in a comfortable chair, possibly beside the wood stove). I do have some things on the computer, but they are printed off to go into my garden notebook. If you missed the back-to-school sales to stock up on 3-ring binders, paper, dividers, file folders, etc, these things are on sale again as people organize their financial affairs for taxes. The file folders are for your previous years’ records. Store those in your file cabinet or a cardboard file box that you can pick up while you are at the office supply store.

In my garden plan video I show you how to put together a complete garden plan using worksheets that are on the CD that comes with the DVD. On the resource page of my website you will find a list of the sections suggested for your notebook. You might have ideas for additional sections. You will need to make an inventory of the seeds you already have before you order new ones. Put that in the seed section of your notebook. You will need to know what crops you are planting and where, so you will need a garden map. After consulting your seed inventory and garden map, make a list of your crops and what needs to be ordered.  Before you send off your seed order you need to figure how many seeds you need. One of the worksheets on the CD helps you do that.

Knowing when to plant and when to expect a harvest is essential to be efficient at growing your food. The CD has a worksheet to help you determine those dates. Once you have the dates you can record them on the Plant / Harvest Schedule, also a worksheet on the CD and available as a free PDF on my website.  Ideally you will fill out a copy of that schedule as you plan it and an extra copy to fill in as the season goes along. It is always good to know what actually happened. Make notes that will be useful later.

If you are serious about feeding yourself from your garden, you should know how much you are producing. At first it just might be that you know how much you planted and if it was enough or not enough. Make a note of that. If you are canning, freezing, or drying, you could write down how many pints or quarts of everything you put up. Even a notation on your calendar would do. At the end of the season you could total everything up and the calendar provides your beginning and ending harvest dates.

However, I want to encourage everyone to eat as much as they can out of their garden all year long. As good as it is to know how much is coming out of your garden, it’s not fun to count or weigh everything. So don’t. You could only keep more detailed records on the crops that you are studying. Or, just weigh out the harvest on a portion of your crop, and since you know the area you have planted, it is easy to estimate your total harvest.

You can keep track of the climate in your garden by having temperature and precipitation records for the year. That is really handy to refer to in later years when you remember something doing particularly good (or bad) in a previous year and you think it might have been weather related. There are worksheets for that on the CD, also. In the weather section of my notebook, I like to include news reports of abnormal weather events to remind me of what was going on.

What varieties of each crop you grow could make a difference, so make sure to include that in your notes. If you can bear to cut up your seed catalogs (or better yet, cut up last year’s seed catalogs) you can cut out the information and pictures of the crops you chose and include them in your notebook. Highlight what it was that made you choose those varieties. It is easy to forget. You will, no doubt, see things in magazines or on the internet that you would like to try in your garden or ideas will pop into your head. Put that in your notebook in the Ideas! section.

Take photographs and put them in your garden notebook or an album devoted to your garden. I don’t mean keep them on your phone or in a digital file on your computer—actually have prints made. Remember, you are putting together a book here. Make sure there is a picture of you in there. You will be surprised how fast things change and it is nice to have a visual record. You might even write a summary of your garden experiences for the year and include it with your photos. In the summary include some yield figures of the things you are paying particular attention to, lessons you’ve learned (both good and bad), and anything else that you think is a highlight.

If you do all this you will be well on your way with record keeping. Some of you out there might have your own system. I invite you to share your ideas here.

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