With planting weather just around the corner here in the Pacific Northwest, I thought I would take you on a little overview of what I’m planning to grow this season. My overall approach is to continue to simplify by limiting experiments and sticking with varieties I know do well where I live.
Peas ‘Bolero’
I accidentally bought just the biggest bag of pea seeds but I love these peas, which produce huge, tasty, and tightly packed seed pods. They are robust and seem especially disease resistant (so far).
Tomatoes ‘Pink Bumble Bee, Prairie Fire, Get Stuffed’
I’m trying a couple of different varieties this season as I’ve mostly been growing a variety of ‘Purple Bumble Bee’ whose colours and flavour have been diluted due to open pollination. I’m hitting reset this year and trying some different shapes and colours to see what does best in my containers.
Nasturtiums
If you’ve been paying attention over the years, you know I love some nasturtiums. They attract aphids away from more tender plants, the aphids in turn are often harvested and controlled by ants, and the flowers are delicious in summer salads. I always get positive comments from my neighbors about their bright colours and they last forever.
Beans ‘Orca‘ + ‘Ferrari’
I’ve had some decent luck with beans in previous years so I’m being a little more intentional about them this season. I prefer larger beans to longer ones and I just plant them in and among my tomatoes, which help give them enough shade that they don’t get baked in the hot sun exposure.
Melon ‘Tasty Bites F1’
While I’m going with a lot of trusted crops in the garden this year, I do want to experiment a little bit. I successfully grew a tiny little melon a few years back, which I started quite late. My deck gets fantastically hot, which limits me largely to peppers and tomatoes but I think if I time it right, melons may do quite nicely as well. I selected a small variety to start.
A Final Note on Planning and Tracking
I have talked quite a bit in the past about having a plan but if you really want to get nerdy, I suggest also tracking how much you harvest and when. Using a simple kitchen scale and an Excel Spreadsheet I have a shortcut link to on my phone, I do my best to accurately weigh and record everything that comes out of the garden. While it is tedious, once you get in the rhythm, you have a lot of very specific and helpful data at your fingertips. I have found it especially helpful to know when I harvest a crop in a “normal” year, as it’s much easier to gauge when food will be ready in a year with extreme weather events or delayed growing. See my example below:
What is something you are excited to try growing this year and what is one crop you swear by?
Last Ditch 
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