Our 5 Garden Goals for 2023 ｜ Self Sufficient Vegetable Garden)

We're Karen and Sarah, and two years ago we bought a farm in the forests of Norway. Neither of us had a lot of practical experience beforehand, but we were determined to work towards our goal to become more self-sufficient. Looking back, we're glad we didn't know how hard it was going to be. Freezing temperatures in winter, water shortage in summer, predator attacks, sick animals, a lot of wheelbarrows, more wheelbarrows, and excruciatingly long winters. The learning curve has been steep, but it's also been one of the best experiences of our lives. Like getting chicks for the first time, culling sheep, harvesting loads of our own food, and creating a peaceful sanctuary to live in tune with the seasons. Subscribe and follow along on our journey. It is finally sowing time, so while I prepare for the growing season I thought I would talk about our garden goals for this year. Last year got really chaotic in so many ways, so our first goal for this upcoming season is to stay organized. Last year I was co-planting without really understanding what that means. Co-planting is when you plant different vegetables or flowers together that benefit each other. Like for example planting onions with carrots because the onion smell will scare off the carrot fly. How I did co-planting on the other hand, was to just sow as much as possible together, and what I thought was maximizing the space was just creating chaos. I would plant out cabbage seedlings, but since they were so small I filled in the gaps with carrots and leeks, but when the cabbages got big they completely suffocated everything else I had planted. Definitely not the way to go. What also happened was that the volunteers without much gardening experience would go into the garden and not be able to find a specific vegetable because everything was sown on top of each other. So this year to make things a little bit easier for everyone I'm staying organized, maybe even a little bit too organized for my liking, and only planting one or two types of vegetables in each bed. And it's easy for people to find what they need, and it's also not as risky to have other people weeding in the garden because it'll be easy to identify which vegetable is growing there. Both of our last growing seasons I planted way, way too many seeds and ended up with too many seedlings. This is also partly the reason why our garden has been so chaotic, because I squeezed in all the seedlings in the bed instead of throwing out the excess. So this year our second goal is to sow according to allocated space. We have the mandala circle, 18 big beds, 8 smaller beds and 10 rows allocated this year, so I should be able to plan how many seedlings I need. In the spirit of staying organized I've sorted all of my seeds according to when I need to sow them. So I have one bag of seeds that need to be sown indoors in February, March, what I want to start in the greenhouse and what I want to direct sow in April and May. The biggest job of sowing seeds indoors is definitely coming in March. Then I'm starting all of the onions, tomatoes, celery and a bunch of flowers. And then I have a bunch of seeds I'm going to direct sow in April and May after the last frost. And last year I started all these seeds indoors but I'm trying to avoid the chaos it created and direct sowing as much as possible. We want to get to a higher level of self-sufficiency very quickly to be able to feed ourselves, our family and all of our volunteers. Therefore our third goal for this season is to grow what we eat. It seems simple enough but I tend to get too excited about growing a large variety of vegetables. Like I mentioned in part one of planning our self-sufficiency garden, my aim is to be realistic this year. This is our third growing season and I finally know now a little bit more about what we eat and how much. Last year I grew way too many beets and celery for example and while we do eat both of those vegetables we don't need unlimited amounts. On the other hand we cannot get enough broccoli, beans and carrots. So this year I'm focusing on our 12 staple crops and allocating most of the garden space to those. We had a lot of food last year but just imagine how much more food we could have had if I just planted more of what we actually eat. The fourth goal we have for the garden this year is to make a pollinator's paradise. Like I mentioned before I want to focus more on medicinal flowers but also flowers that pollinators enjoy. I've learned that it's important to have pollen and nectar available early and late in this season for bumblebees especially. So over the last two years we have lots of fruit trees, willow and crocus and there are already dandelion and thistle growing in our lawns. For the height of summer we're planting lavender, daisies, raspberries, wild rose hip, salvias and verbenas. For butterflies we're planting flowers with bright colors like echinacea and nasturtium and zinnium. I'm also planting a variety of sizes everything from baby's breath to sunflowers to attract as many different pollinators as possible. Our fifth and last goal is to harvest on time. I keep doing this. I save vegetables for later for some reason and then suddenly they've bolted or been eaten by the gopher. I think I'm living in a bit of a scarcity mindset because I still can't believe how much food our garden is producing. But a lot of plants, especially flowers, will be encouraged to produce more if you harvest from them. And harvesting on time also means that I get open beds to plant new seedlings in and maximize production even more. A lot of people are jumping on the trend of growing your own food. So what are your garden goals this year? We hope you like this video and we'll see in the next one. Bye!