OK, so we are officially in maybe what we could call a reflective season in the garden.

So the leaves are falling or have already fallen.

The garden is slowing or maybe has come to a screeching halt and our hands are just a little bit less dirty right now.

And I think that's the perfect time to start reflecting and maybe doing a little planning for next year because surprise, I got my first seed catalog in the mail already a couple of weeks ago.

So today on Just Grow Something, we are connecting our garden reflection and are planning with our seed ordering.

So this is how we take everything that we learned from this year and we turn it into a little bit of a road map for next year's success before we start laying out the actual blueprint.

Because you all know I am a planner, right?

So we're going to cover how to analyze this year's garden to make better choices for next season, how to figure out how many seeds you'll need for next year, and then how to do an inventory so that you can order seeds efficiently and cost effectively without getting caught up in those seed catalog daydreams.

You know the ones.

Let's dig in.

Hey, I'm Karen, and what started as a small backyard garden 20 years ago turned into a lifelong passion for growing food.

Now as a market farmer and horticulturist, I want to help you do the same on this podcast.

I am your friend in the garden teaching evidence based techniques to help you grow your favorites and build confidence in your own garden space.

So grab your garden journal and a cup of coffee and get ready to just grow something.

All right, my gardening friends, you have reached a milestone.

I mean, OK, we did it together, but you are responsible for this.

We hit 300,000 downloads of this podcast last week.

Good golly miss Molly.

We are getting ready to wind up the 5th season of this podcast and I remember being super excited that my first episode got 9 downloads that very first week.

And I mean, one of them was me.

So of course that meant that there were eight other people had listened to me rambling on about gardening that first week.

And I know there are a lot of you who are new to the show this season and I am super grateful that you are here and appreciate you reaching out with kind words and reviews.

And I'm just so glad that you are getting so much value from what we do here every week and through the newsletter and the Facebook group.

And I am floored by the number of you who say that you have gone back and listened from that very first episode because we are on episode 277, and that doesn't include, like, replays and the like.

So that is some dedication, my friends.

And I appreciate you.

And I do want to shout out my Ogs, the ones who have been around since that first season and continue to stick around and who continue to reach out through socials or e-mail.

You know who you are.

I would name each of you by name, but I'm afraid I would miss somebody and I don't want to do that.

So just know that you are loved and I greatly appreciate all of the times that you have shared this podcast because it could not have grown without you.

And I also need to shout out everyone supporting on Patreon or who has sent me a coffee or three on Buy Me a Coffee.

You All Get to listen for free on a myriad of platforms, including my own website, but it's definitely not free to run this thing.

And even though my hosting platform has always been free, who remembers the old host read anchor ads.

If you heard OG, you definitely remember those.

But there are costs involved with hosting the website and recording and editing software.

So I have, you know, any few dollars monthly from those of you who have chosen to contribute really does go a long way.

And I mean, in that same vein, I have to acknowledge our newest patron over on Patreon.

Aaron, thank you for joining at the C patron level.

Thank you so much for that.

And those of you who have purchased merch from the website or use an affiliate code or bought through my Amazon list, like all of these things, these are all like a dollar here and a dollar there kind of contributions, but they've slowly added up to where I might actually be breaking even on this thing now.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And if you haven't supported in some other way, just sitting through the ads when they play on the show is also a way to support.

I try to be very thoughtful about where those ad breaks cut in and how frequent they are because I don't want this to become like 15 minutes of information and then 30 minutes of ad because, right.

So I do appreciate you putting up with the ads and the ad reads and me promoting our handful of sponsors each season just to keep this show going.

So really, I just wanted to say a giant thank you.

I don't ever want to take these little milestones for granted and not acknowledge them with you because again, you did this.

You listen every week, you share the episodes, you engage on YouTube, which is growing very, very slowly and doesn't even count towards these download numbers.

So I appreciate my Youtubers too, thank you.

And I can't help each week but to try to imagine you all sitting in front of me as I talk about all these sciency gardening things and recognize that in the beginning there would have been 8 of you sitting and listening in a very small room which was already super cool.

And now every week there are 1002 thousand, occasionally as many as 3000 of you listening to what I'm saying, and that blows me away.

O let's keep digging in each week, shall we?

OK, so in that vein, if you have listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I am a big proponent of the garden journal.

Reflection of that type helps us figure out what worked well in the garden and what didn't.

OK.

And I don't need you thinking that a garden journal has to be something that is over the top or super detailed or, you know, when we talk about reflection, you know, very reflective in some nature because I am not a journaler per SE, OK.

I don't sit down at the end of the day or start my day off with journaling of any kind.

What I'm referring to in journaling garden journaling is just some notations about what has happened in the garden and and why it is happening.

Because right now we're in the last week of November.

If you sit down and think right now, what did you plant in March?

Truly, what did you plant?

How many of each of those things did you plant?

If you're not somebody who plants like the exact same thing in the exact same numbers every single year, you are likely going to have a difficult time thinking about that right now.

That is where your garden journal comes in.

So whether it is taking the map that you have laid out for yourself at the beginning of the season or the notes that you have taken about what's going to get planted and where it got planted.

And if you can take that throughout the season and just make notes about what happened, then that is going to help you in figuring all the rest of this out for the next season, OK.

It helps us especially with understanding our yield based on what we planted.

So if you can remember what you planted this past March and how many of those things, so if we're talking about, say, heads of lettuce, right, if you remember that you planted 6 heads of lettuce, did you harvest all six of those heads of lettuce?

And on what frequency were you harvesting?

Because if you understand that and you compare that with your weather or other things that were going on, you can think about whether or not you needed to plant more or less, right?

And also, do we have seeds leftover or did we save seeds or do we need more seeds?

These are all the things that we can be sort of reflecting on.

And these are things that we can use our garden journal for.

And again, these can just be sticky notes.

These can be notations of some sort, but that's why I really, really am a proponent of this.

Now, if you did not take notes or you do not keep a dark garden journal, all is not lost for you, I promise.

But now is the time to sort of sit down and think about what happened this season.

OK?

This is the information that we're going to need for planning.

Before we even grab a seed catalog, we want to look back what did well, what didn't, which of the things that we planted sort of outperformed their expectations and which ones were a total disappointment.

This is the time to figure out whether or not weather was a factor.

So even if you didn't write these things down, even if you weren't paying attention to the weather from week to week and making those types of notations, can you go back to, you know, a weather app of some sort and look back and see, was this a particularly rainy season?

And it was that a factor in what you were growing or the yield of what you were growing?

I will tell you that if I wasn't keeping track of things in a garden journal and I were to look at this season particularly, and if I was a new gardener, maybe this was only my second or third year planting.

I would be so thoroughly impressed with how well my leafy greens did and most of my early spring crops because for the first time in a very long time, we actually had a spring here in West Central Missouri.

Normally we are cold, cold, cold.

We'll have a couple of spikes of really warm weather and then we might have like 2 weeks of what we might consider something that looks like spring and then all of a sudden boom, we are into summer weather.

And so that usually means that our spring crops are fairly short lived.

We have to get them in fairly early.

We have to cover them to protect them from late cold snaps.

And then, you know, we might have a week or two, maybe 3, where the weather is very conducive to those cool weather crops growing and thriving.

And then all of a sudden we're trying to protect them from this crazy heat that suddenly showed up and we might have to harvest early, right?

This past year was completely different from that.

We had an extended period of spring weather.

We had tons of rain and it was very consistent.

And so we were seeing our leafy greens just beautifully, I mean growing beautifully, tons and tons of harvest continuing way later into the summer season than they ever have before.

And if I didn't know that this weather had been unusual in terms of garden production, I might think to myself as I go back and look like, oh, well, I had kale going for way longer, you know, into the season that I anticipated so I can plant less kale next year, only to find myself very disappointed if that weather pattern doesn't repeat.

OK, So these are the types of things that we're taking notes of.

These are the types of things that we're thinking about.

Did your companion plantings work or could they be tweaked?

You know, I tried a bunch of new stuff this year, and if I didn't keep track of that and if I didn't kind of track the yield or make notes about how something got delayed because it was paired with something else, then I might not remember that for next season.

I might, you know, not plan properly.

Is there are there ways that I could tweak those things?

Were there pest problems that affected your yield?

You know, we talked a lot here in the Midwest about squash vine bores and squash bugs in our summer squashes.

And I will tell you that this year was very different for me for a lot of different reasons.

And I might end up needing to do a whole episode on what I did because it was so dramatic, radically different.

But remember, causation and correlation are not the same thing.

OK, Just because I saw a reduced level of pests.

And I also changed the way that I did some of my companion plantings and my trap cropping.

That does not necessarily mean that the way I changed those plantings was the reason that I had fewer pests early on.

Because remember that weather was also different.

And I have a sneaky suspicion that part of the reason that the vine borers and the squash bugs stayed away for as long as that they did was because of of the number of rainfall events that we were having.

So I can't, you know, say definitively like what I did in terms of my plantings was the only reason I have to take that weather into consideration.

Right.

You should also be thinking about whether or not you tried new varieties and whether they worked well or they didn't.

I tried a couple of new tomato varieties this year, and actually, I was pleasantly surprised by some of them.

And they are ones that I'm going to repeat versus last year where I tried some and I wasn't very impressed with the yield.

And again, I wouldn't know these things if I wasn't taking notes.

So even if you didn't do a garden journal or you didn't note any of these things that I talked about, now is the time to really sort of sit down and just reflect back.

OK.

Understanding the different factors that affect our yield will help you figure out whether the results that you've experienced are typical or if something threw them off positively or negatively.

Either way, this allows you to adjust accordingly if you feel like you had too much or too little of something.

And that all affects the number of seeds that you're going to need.

OK, so that flood of see catalogs that starts coming in is both a joy and a temptation, right?

I mean, so much joy.

Like my stack of catalogs that comes in, I like wait for there to be a certain number of catalogs and certain catalogs that I order from or I just like to look through every single year.

There's about four or five of them out of the, you know, probably, I don't know, I probably get 12 to 13 different catalogs that show up and then multiple versions of those same catalogs throughout the season.

But there's four or five of them that I really like to peruse through and who are always coming up with like new varieties.

And they have really beautiful photos in them.

And so I wait until those four or five show up and then I grab some hot chocolate and I pluck myself into my lounge chair by my fire with a highlighter or a Sharpie or both.

And I just spend several hours just curled up in that chair highlighting things, circling things and justice, like, oh gosh, you know, look at all these different varieties and look how much fun I could have with this and all these kinds of things, right?

That is fun.

But I know as I'm doing this, even with the amount of space that I have to grow, right?

We're on 40 acres out here.

There are 4 acres of fully plantable area that we have worked over the years.

I have a lot of room to grow pretty much whatever I want, but I know I am one person, you know, obviously with the help of my husband at this point for the farm itself, I can't grow all that stuff no matter how much I want to grow everything that I highlight or I circle with my sharpie.

OK, so I have to keep it manageable.

I can have my pie in the side dreams too and just kind of Daydream about all these different cool varieties.

But then in the end, I really got to sort of get serious and figure it out.

So this is how we keep it manageable, right?

It's OK.

Go through make all your make all your circles and and have your daydreams.

But if you can make a list before you sit down to peruse the seed catalogs, then you're going to be off to a better start, right?

This is going to help you sort of keep in mind the things that you actually need.

If you write down what you actually need ahead of time, it's OK to say, oh, I, I love all twenty of these different varieties of tomatoes.

But if you make a list of, yeah, well, I know I only need like 6 or 8 tomato plants and maybe I don't want them to all be different varieties.

OK, that's going to keep you injected and check a little bit, right?

And then if you can check what you already have before you go and sit down, you know, do a seed inventory and also test your older seeds for viability using a damp paper towel test.

Then you are going to have an idea of, OK, I've already got 3 or 4 varieties of tomato seeds in my stash and again, I only need 6 tomato plants.

So do I really need a new variety of tomatoes?

These are the things that you can, you know, sort of think through, right?

So how are we going to effectively manage our seed inventory and make sure that what we have already, we're not going to duplicate, we're not going to double up on.

So the first thing is to just gather all of your seeds in one place, right?

And then sort them into categories, whatever makes sense for you.

It could be crop type.

That's how I do it.

I like to break it down like these are tomatoes, these are Peppers, these are summer squashes, these are winter squashes, these are leafy greens, whatever.

You can also do it if it's easier for you by season.

So these are my spring, summer, and fall plantings and then maybe my overwintering, right?

Whatever works best for the way that your brain works.

Then you want to go through and you want to look at each one of those packets and make sure that they are still good, they're intact, the seeds look like they're still quality.

You don't have any old or damaged seeds.

And then if there's any question on that, you want to test for viability.

Now you can use the paper towel test like I mentioned.

And if you haven't done this before, you've not seen it done, it is very simple.

Essentially, you're just going to count out a certain number of seeds.

So if you have a large number and you can, you can spare 10 of them.

This is just makes the math very easy.

Pick out 10 seeds, get a paper towel, dampen that paper towel, lay the seeds out, space them out in that paper towel and then fold it over on itself so that those seeds are in contact with the towel with the the moisture from the towel right?

And then put it into a plastic bag and and close that up.

You want to write on the plastic bag the seed that you are sprouting and preferably also write on there the number of expected days to germination.

And then also write the date that you started this test and then just tuck it away somewhere in a warm spot.

You know, check every few days to make sure that everything is still nice and damp in there.

And all we're doing is we're waiting for those seeds to sprout.

OK, so after the anticipated number of days that you're, you know, you, you should be waiting for it to, to germinate, then you can go back and look and see how many of them actually germinated.

So if you have seeds that we're supposed to germinate within five to seven days, you wait the seven days you come back.

If eight out of those 10 seeds have sprouted, cool, you've got an 80% germination rate.

That's fantastic.

Those seeds are great, carry on.

But if you've only got three of them that have sprouted, that's a 30% germination rate and that's not very good.

So then your option becomes.

When you use those seeds, do you just over seed, meaning OK, now I'm going to plant twice as many in the same spot because I know only 30% of them are going to germinate?

Or do you toss those in the compost pile and you buy fresh seeds?

That's entirely up to you and your budget.

OK, Once you have figured out you know which seeds are still good and the ones that you're going to hang on to, and you've just sort of divide them up into categories.

Now go through the seed packets 1 by 1 and decide whether or not you're going to keep them or if you're going to pass them on to somebody else.

You might decide to pass them on if it's a variety that you don't intend to grow again or even a category of plant that you don't intend to grow again.

You know, I mean, if you tried a new variety of tomato and it just didn't do well for you or you weren't particularly fond of the flavor or whatever, go ahead and pass those seeds on to somebody else.

You don't have to grow them again just because you own those seeds, right?

It could be that you tried loofah and it was such a space hog that you decided you are never growing loofah again and you can pass those seeds on to somebody else.

This is going to help you in managing your space, you know, your seed stash, but also your time.

Because if you're getting rid of the seeds that you have no intention of ever growing again, that's less time that you're going to spend going through your seed stash when it comes time to plant and you're trying to find the seeds that you need to start or that you need to put out in the garden, right?

And then probably the most important part of this is to track your inventory.

You know, if you can create yourself a little inventory sheet to track what seeds you have, where you got them from, especially if you're like me and you're ordering from multiple catalogs because you just like the variety.

But then you know, it, it's a more generic package or something or it's being sold by somebody who is not actually the seed grower.

So you've got like, you know, a burpee seed package, but you bought it at the garden center.

You know, whatever it is, just mark where you purchased it so that you can find that seed again if you you really like it and you need to replace it.

And then also any notes or experiences that you had with it, you know, if you want to regrow this particular variety, but you realize that, you know, it didn't really germinate very well.

And that's, you know, kind of one of the problems with that variety, but you really liked it.

OK, but make a note about that so that you know that you have to plant extra seed the next year.

You can do this in Google Sheets.

You can do an Excel spreadsheet if that's the way that your brain works.

I used the inventory sheet from my Grow and Flourish planner that I got from the Girly Homesteader because I prefer to write this out by hand rather than doing things electronically.

I feel like gardening is a very kind of tactile activity, and for some reason all of my planning and organizing activities also tend to be tactile in that manner.

So I don't do an electronic version I use, I use a piece of paper.

A pro tip on this would be to adjust your list as you go.

So if you do an inventory now and then you decide what to order, and then you update that list after you order, right?

You get all of your seeds in and then you update it again after each round of planting.

This is going to make your life a whole lot easier when it comes to doing a seed inventory the next time because those open seed packets can be very deceiving.

It might feel like there are a whole lot more seeds in there than there actually are.

And this can leave you short the next time that you go to plant.

I am speaking from experience here, right?

And the vice versa can also happen.

You can end up ordering seeds because you thought you were running low, but then you go to, you know, update everything and you realize, oh, there's a lot more seeds in that packet than you realize.

And now you have way too many.

And I am also speaking from experience here.

So if you can take a few moments along the way during your planting stages to update that list, then you have a running list and you can actually take advantage of sales much more easily and more quickly if you do this.

So right now, you know, I'm getting emails from seed suppliers because it's the very end of the year and they're refreshing their supply and they're like, hey, you know, our end of of season, you know, seeds are 30 to 50% off.

Take advantage now.

But if I'm in the middle of working on 12 other things, I don't have time to go and do that seed inventory right then to take advantage of that sale.

If I have an updated list, I can just flip through and go, oh, you know what, I am running short on this, this, this and this.

I can take advantage of that sale really quick without having to sit down and worry about going through an extended, you know, process of doing that inventory.

So that's just one more way that you can kind of help yourself along.

If you have accumulated a very, very large seed stash, which I know a lot of us do and I think you probably.

Also are well advised to compare your seed suppliers #1 off the top.

If you can look for regional seed companies that specialize in your growing zone.

You might want to shop with them first, specifically if you have some crops that have been a little bit difficult for you to grow, whether it's in terms of their survivability in your growing zone or maybe the types of diseases that you face in that type of crop.

If you can find somebody like for us nearby, we've got the Buffalo Seed Company.

They have several farms that they work with right here in the Midwest where they're growing the seeds, right?

They're they're growing these varieties, they're saving the seeds for multiple seasons and replanting the ones that look the best and have performed the best.

And now you have something that is bio adapted to our region that is fantastic, especially when you're talking about diseases, especially when you're talking about resistance to insect predation.

So if you can find a regional seed company that is going to do that for you, then you might start with that.

Or again, you might find a company who's having an early bird special on certain varieties.

And you can save money if you're looking around.

And also don't shy away from buying in bulk if it's something that you plant a lot of that doesn't lose it's fertility very quickly.

I have purchased seeds in multiple # bags when they've been on sale because it was such a great deal and a lot of seeds will last for years in storage with no problem.

So check with different suppliers before you make your final purchases.

Don't just go on like that one catalog that had that beautiful picture of that particular variety in it and just make your decision to go with them, especially if we're talking about buying seeds through catalogs or online and you're having to pay for shipping.

So the more you can purchase from one company, A, they might waive the shipping over a certain, you know, dollar amount, but B, you're not going to be paying shipping from six different companies that you're only ordering two or three little seed packets from, because then that really starts to add up.

And the other thing too, is if you can, you know, make the list of things that you really want to grow and the varieties of those things that you really want to grow, and you can go look at your local garden center.

You can save yourself the shipping and you might be able to find them in smaller quantities if those catalogs only seem to carry, you know, packets that are much larger than what you might need.

But again, don't let that be too much of A concern with most of your crops because they often times are going to hold in storage quite well in terms of the seeds, right.

And then finally, don't forget to plan for successions, OK?

If we go back to that, you know, original thought about our lettuce in the spring and we think, OK, well, we grew, you know, 6 heads of lettuce, but they were all planted at the same time.

And so they all came ready at the same time.

And you were having to rush to eat salads before all that lettuce went bad or bolted in the field or in the garden.

Then maybe you think about staggering those plantings if 6 was maybe too much all at once but wouldn't have been enough for the entire season.

Then maybe you decide to plant 10 and you do 5, and then two weeks later or three weeks later you're transplanting another five.

And then you think, oh, well, you know what?

I actually didn't end up having any lettuces in the fall.

And it would have been nice to have those salads then.

And you decide, OK, well, I think I'm going to do the same thing.

I'll plant 5 in the late summer and then I'll, you know, wait three weeks and I'll plant five more.

Well, now you've just doubled the number of seeds that you need compared to what you planted or more than doubled the number of seeds that you compared to the previous season, right?

So think about your succession order enough to stagger those plantings throughout the season for your consistent harvest.

And then just remember, you might have to order early on some of these things because some varieties sell out really fast, especially those airlines.

OK, So what it boils down to is a garden journal is great.

If you can reflect back on what has happened this season.

No notes, no problem.

We're just going to sit down and we're going to reflect back and figure out what it is that went well and what didn't decide what we want to grow, how much we want of each of those crops.

And if you're having a hard time figuring that out right this how, how much do you want of each of those crops and and how many seeds does that require from you?

I am going to put a link in the show notes for my plan by yield handout.

I pulled this straight from my plan like a pro course to help you figure out like how many seeds you're going to need or how many plants you will need based on the yield that you want.

You can go to jessicaorsomethingpodcast.com/yield Y i.e.

LDI will link to that in the show notes and it's going to give you, I think I've got like 30 different crops in there that you can look and go, OK, you know, a 10 foot row of tomatoes would yield me X number of pounds of tomatoes.

And that's going to give you a little bit more of an idea of how many seeds or how many plants you're going to need as you sort of sit down and figure out how many seeds you need to order.

Just remember, before you sit down with those seed catalogs, have a plan.

Or at least just a list.

It's not to say that you can't spend hours dreaming of all of those really cool varieties, because I know I'm going to.

It just means that when it comes time to order, you'll have a little bit of a plan and will be less likely to go overboard.

Well, maybe until next time, my gardening friends keep on cultivating that dream garden, and we'll talk again soon.