Welcome 2024! As 2023 came to a close, I felt a prompting to really focus on our gardens and intentionality. I acknowledge that I struggle with crossing the finish line on projects and wholeheartedly believe that everything is more fun WITH people. So I put together a garden series to provide some structure to my year and add in people with the hope that I will have motivation to cross the finish line of this year with joy in what was accomplished rather than regret.
My goal is to have a class focused on what things you want to be doing coming up next for the garden. The first 4 classes have been organized and named. I am starting with 4 just to see what the interest would be and focus on the big jobs of getting prepared for the garden. If there are people who want to continue the garden series, the next 4 months will focus on garden chores, visiting gardens, doing projects with each other and generally cheering each other on while learning together. The last 4 months will focus on harvesting, preserving, seed saving and putting the garden to bed.
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My hope is that while I walk with others through a garden year, I will keep up myself with the joy of keeping a lovely garden… the “threat” of people dropping by is great motivation to weed right? 😛
I am blessed that the church we attend is willing to host the classes and allow us to use their equipment to video the class. My amazing Sir T put together the video from Class #1 from the Garden Series and uploaded it to my youtube channel. I only had 60 slides but had way too much information and went over time. I ended up skipping some information but I will share it in next month’s class as it fits in perfectly with it.
Next month's class, Planning Your Garden Layout, Crops and Planting Schedule Class #2, is scheduled for Sun Feb 11 at 2 pm at Vriesland Church of God. If you happen to be in the area, you are welcome to join us!
The last part of the video from Class #1 starting at 1:25 (1 hour 25 minutes in) is great preparation for Class #2. I am encouraging people to try to think about and answer the questions so they would be more prepared for the coming class. I plan to go over the questions you need to ask yourself and information on how to create your garden space, diagram it and plant that space. This can be applied to all categories of gardening. Ornamental perennial beds to an annual food bed covers a lot of ground.
Some good things to know would be the size of your garden, the individual sizes of the plots or rows, and how many of the sections you have. Maybe take a couple of photos with your phone to help jog your memory.
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| Our yard from a few years ago. A lot has changed since then! |
I found some big packs of graph paper at the second hand store and plan to bring it to share at the next class. I really like graphing out my garden spaces on graph paper. It is so helpful for my um…. particularness of spacing.
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I created a worksheet several years ago that I use every year to plan my food garden and it has been so helpful to me to track all the things. I reformatted it into a customizable food garden worksheet for you to use for your garden. You are welcome to print it out and fill in the blanks. You may not need all the pages or plant all the things, so use what is helpful and don’t worry about the rest.
I hope that you learn something from our first class and have fun. Let me know if I missed something or you have any suggestions for another garden class I could teach.
Happy gardening!
