Planning The Homestead Garden

Right now is the time to start planning what new fruits and vegetables you will be adding to this coming year's garden. The goal of any urban homesteader is to produce as much food as possible from whatever space is available. If you have room for it, at least one or two fruit trees should be on the list. Here at the Williamson Ranch we have already planted: two sweet cherries, two sour cherries, three apples, one pear, two plums, and a nectarine which will probably get shovel pruned this year if it continues to look so poorly. Fruit trees represent an investment in time, but will give you a whole lot of bang for your buck and for the garden space. If you want to can and preserve food, having your own fruit trees will make it almost free.

I love this part of gardening. The part where you look through catalogs and imagine what you want to be able to go out in your own yard to pick. I love reading about the different varieties that are available and whittling my choices down to the best ones for my region.

The challenge is to not over-buy and choosing what you will actually use. This is more difficult than you would imagine. For example, I am really intrigued by black currants. I would like to plant some. I have had a black and red currant jam that was really good, so I know I could do something with them...plus they are apparently packed with vitamin C. However, black currants are not particularly good for eating fresh. What I cannot find out is if the vitamin C content is still impressive if you preserve the currants. If drying them removes all the vitamin C benefit then are they really that useful to me? Does jam retain some of the fresh fruit's nutritional profile?

I actually have a bag of dried black currants in my pantry. I whipped it out yesterday to read about it's nutritional make up. No vitamin C is listed on the package. None? Drying it loses every last bit of scurvy fighting goodness?

To help me choose wisely this year I am going to outline a few questions I should be asking myself about every plant I wish to add to my collection:

Do I actually like it? You'd be amazed at how easy it is to convince one's self that a medlar is a must-have because it's so ancient and mysterious...surely it will be a gem? Yeah, be careful there cowgirl- medlars have to rot before they become edible.

Can it be preserved satisfactorily if I get a bumper crop of it? Apples are a great fruit to grow, but listen, if you don't like apple juice or apple butter or dried apple rings or apple sauce...if you only like apples fresh, then don't cover your limited space with apples just because you like them. Some day your apple trees will grow up and really start cranking out the fruit- more than you can possibly eat fresh or store in your root cellar.

Do I already have a spot ready for it? This is a super trap. It is so easy to look ahead at spring which is still many months away and imagine that there will be plenty of time to chop down that giant fir tree, dig up it's roots, and amend the soil in that spot to prepare it for your mini-blueberry farm. But be realistic. Do you know where you will put the things you want to order? If they come tomorrow will you be able to put them in the ground?

Is it hard to find? One of the biggest benefits of growing your own fruits and vegetables is that you can grow things that are very hard (or impossible) to find commercially. If Fuji apples are your favorite in the whole world and you can't get enough of them and don't want to pay for them anymore...go ahead and plant yourself a Fuji. But Fujis are everywhere. There are apple varieties you will never find in the store that are excellent. Go to apple tastings in the fall to find some more rare varieties to plant. Currants are difficult to find here in the PNW so growing them (provided I like them enough) is a really good idea. Tart cherries are also quite hard to find and I now wish I hadn't planted any sweet ones since this region is just covered in sweet cherries that I can buy for cheap when they're in season. Sweet cherries don't preserve well either so a bumper crop means the only thing on the menu for two weeks will be cherries.

Will it grow well where I live? Sometimes the reason it's hard to find certain fruits locally is because they don't grow well in your region. Believe it or not, bananas do not grow well in the Pacific Northwest. Even kiwis may be stretching the boundaries of what will do well here, and in this case I'm going to take a chance. Because I love kiwis and some people do grow them here, whereas NO ONE grows citrus here.


The main goal of my garden is to have something good to eat from it all year round. Kiwis ripen in the fall and can be stored for quite a while giving you some good winter fruit eating which is important if you are dedicated to eating seasonally. Asparagus is a must for me because planting it in my own garden means I can get it before it hits the stores. Asparagus is one of the earliest vegetables to pop up in the spring. It takes time to establish and as it is one of the only perrenial vegetables you must have a dedicated spot for it. It can produce food for you for up to twenty years. It's also often quite expensive to buy so planting enough for us to eat means I can have it for much less money.

Philip is not a huge fan of asparagus but I think he may find himself warming to it as we continue on our local eating path. If he doesn't eat it I can eat it all myself.

I look at the foods I like to buy and ask myself if they are things I can produce well myself. I don't cook a with a ton of raisins but now that I can't buy them I am wishing I had already been growing grapes last year and making some raisins for the pantry. So I'm looking at grapes for my yard as well.

Here's a list of the things I am thinking about adding to my garden: red currants, gooseberries, huckleberries (to put where a couple of my rhododendrons have perished), asparagus crowns, strawberries, grapes, black currants, rugosa roses (for the rose hips), kiwis, hops (this is just a dream perhaps), silvan berries, and quince.