Garden Planning New Year’s Resolutions

Want to kick some growing goals in the New Year? Use your summer break to observe and interact with some new ideas to improve your yields with our garden planning New Year’s resolutions!

1. Plan ahead

Back in Issue 6 of Pip we featured an article by Michael Hewins – master market gardener with Milkwood Permaculture.

In the article, Michael shares his fantastically simple, yet effective method for planning your garden from seed sowing to harvest. Grab our 2024 Kitchen Garden Calendar for your copy of our “Sow When” poster, which will help make the garden planning process so much simpler.

Garden Planning New Year

2. Plant something new every week

If you don’t have time to plan (and more importantly, stick to it), Michael thinks the old gardener’s rule of thumb – “plants something new every week” is pretty worthwhile.

It also means your garden ends up being a gorgeous patchwork of productiveness even if you only have a few hours a week to devote to it.

You can also still use the calendar planner to ensure successions keep coming every week, as well as to reflect on how accurate your predictions were!

Garden Planning New Year

3. Track your progress

Another favourite trick for keeping our vegie patch productive is tracking our progress over the year via a harvest calendar.

In David Holmgren’s book ‘Retrosuburbia’ there are great garden productivity metrics listed for many case studies via weight.

Weighing your produce each time you harvest may seem like an extra chore, but in our experience we have found that it gets us regularly thinking about how much we need to grow, as well as giving us a rewarding feeling for our gardening efforts (writing five kilos of potatoes down as a single day’s harvest is pretty darn satisfying!).

asparagus

4. Think short- and long-term goals (annuals + perennials)

Permaculture invites us to think long-term about the way we tread on this earth, and there is much great work out there on how we can integrate perennials (plants that do not need to be resown each year) into our gardens and diet.

But perennials take time, so while it is incredibly rewarding to focus on long-term investment crops (asparagus, artichokes, berries, and fruit and nut trees) it’s great to also give yourself some short-term wins with annuals too.

How to Grow Seedlings from Scratch

5. Time audit

For most of us gardening is relaxing, but I’m sure we’ve all been at a point at one time or another where we have bitten off more than we can chew in the vegie garden stakes (and I don’t just mean a glut of zucchinis!).

Be realistic about how much time you can give your garden with a time audit, and remember that slow, staggered progress is better than taking on more than you can manage.

If schedules work for you, make sure you book in regular times during the week you can devote to your garden. Different plants can fill different niches too – some require more care than others.

Permaculture books and courses can help you to identify and plan a garden implementation that will be successful rather than overwhelming.

Planting-Berries-Summer-Harvest-Blueberries

6. Taste audit

What do you really really love to eat? Incentivise yourself with a few favourites and focus on growing these really well.

If you want to kick gardening goals this year, make sure you’re growing stuff you actually want to eat and spending time on them will seem like fun rather than work!

Like more articles like this one? Subscribe to Pip Magazine’s print or digital editions here.

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