Planning Your BEST GARDEN - Tips for Crop Rotation AND Keeping Weeds Down

Spring is here and planting season is right around the corner. This past week I've been dreaming up my 2025 garden. I drew up a rough sketch of where I want to plant everything in my garden this year and today I just want to share with you my version of crop rotation and some of my best tips for where to plant certain crops. I have another super fun gardening project that I have planned for today that I've been dying to do for quite a while now. The warm weather and sunshine that we've been having has our energy levels up so hopefully today will be a productive day. Okay so new plan. We were going to take this pile of wood chips right here and we were going to mulch around our raised beds around the fruit trees and we knew a little bit of what we were getting when we ordered these wood chips. We knew that they were not going to be really fine beautiful wood chips that you would use to actually like mulch a garden or something but we didn't know it would be this bad. We're finding like big chunks of metal in it finding almost logs in there like stuff that I would use for firewood and we're also finding black walnuts in there which I knew that there was no guarantee that there wouldn't be black walnut stuff in here but we decided we figured it would probably be okay but finding actual black walnuts in there we know that that is not going to be okay to put on the garden because black walnuts release a chemical compound known as juglone which is toxic to lots and lots of plants, tomatoes, apple trees, most of the plants that we have on our homestead. So there's no way we can use this around our garden so we have a new plan. We are going to take the leaves from that leaf pile over there and mulch around our raised beds for today and we'll have to figure out something else for the fruit trees later on. Check out the piece of metal that I found like this is not mulch. This is not mulch. Using lots of mulch is something we really believe in here on our homestead. It helps us out so much. Mulching keeps the weeds down and it's building the soil at the same time as long as you're using a good source of mulch. We like to use leaf mulch for a lot of stuff in our garden. It works really well, does really good at weed suppression because the leaves all matted together make so that it just makes a good solid barrier for the weeds and then by the end of the year as they're starting to break down and then by next spring they can be tilled into the soil and they're building your soil. We used to get leaves from a lawn service once they were doing their fall cleanup. That lawn service went out of business and I haven't been able to find another one that will deliver them for us. So we actually rigged these leaves up from our neighbor's place. It really wasn't that big of a job and we were able to get a lot of leaves and we know that there's no walnut leaves in here. Michelle is really excited to start planting her raised bed up by the house today but we want to get this mulching done first and she said something about it being warm. It has been warm the last little while but today it's actually kind of chilly. Last year we put a layer of weed fabric down around all of my raised beds with a thick layer of leaves on top and we really loved it and it was very cost effective. The leaves were super soft to walk on barefoot and they also protected our feet from the black fabric that got really hot in the sun. The subject of weed fabric is pretty volatile. There's a lot of really strong opinions out there on how awful weed fabric is. People say it kills earthworms, it's ugly, it's killing your soil. So for whatever it's worth here is my take on it. Gardening has looked really different for me in different stages of my life. When I had small kids I simplified my garden even more than I do now and I took every shortcut possible including weed fabric. Now that Cody is home and my kids are older I've been able to add in more variety to my garden and also go a bit more hardcore on some things. When I was doing all the gardening myself there was no way that I could cook from scratch, homeschool, take care of a toddler, and keep up with all the weeds around here. Weed fabric is a shortcut that I think was absolutely worth it for me but I will say I've noticed over the years that plants don't perform quite as well with weed fabric as they do say with just like a heavy leaf mulch. The soil just isn't quite as happy. Our grapevines are a classic example of this. They're doing okay but I can definitely tell that they're needing a boost. Since I have more help this year I decided to replace the weed fabric around my grapes with a layer of compost and then some sort of mulch and hopefully this will help to suppress the weeds enough to keep this area manageable but still allow the soil to be happier. Here around my raised beds I decided to leave the weed fabric down in combination with the leaf mulch as extra protection against weeds. I'm not growing anything in the soil around these raised beds so it doesn't matter to me if the soil here isn't quite as nice. I am working towards getting away from weed fabric on our homestead but I also don't apologize for taking shortcuts here and there if it means keeping my sanity and moving ahead in our self-sufficiency goals. You can absolutely grow beautiful veggies using weed fabric. I wouldn't have been able to grow as much food in the past if I hadn't used it so I have no regrets. Your garden doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful and abundant. I really think that some compromises here and there can actually be very beneficial in the long run. Good job Eden. You may wonder why we're already mulching. This is the kind of thing that I like to get done as soon as possible. Any little tiny thing that you can do before planting season starts is going to help so much with the craziness of spring. I tend to get really overwhelmed in the spring. I just kind of honestly expect some of it. It's just coming out of all those winter, those slow winter routines into being outside and keeping up with the garden. Anything like this, all the little mulching projects that can be done before the plants start coming up is always really really worth it. One of the biggest mistakes that we made when we were first homesteading was just always being a step behind. We kind of joked about it as always being a day late and a dollar short and one of the things that's really helped us to stay on top of our homestead is like thinking ahead and like foreseeing issues that come up, learning from last year, learning from previous years of the times that overwhelmed us, and then getting a head start on those. If you can stay a step ahead of your homestead you're going to be so much happier and there's so much less work. If you stay on top of mulching, like actually mulch before any weeds come up, you save yourself so much time. We're going to take a quick break from being outside to tell you about the sponsor of today's video, Birch Living. We've had our Birch Luxe natural mattress for over a year now and we've loved it ever since the day that we got it. We work hard to keep as many toxins as possible out of our food and water so it only makes sense to do the same with the air that we're breathing. We spend at least a third of our lives in our beds, or at least we should be doing that, and mattresses are notorious for off-gassing toxic chemicals. Materials normally used to make them soft and fire resistant are things like fiberglass and polyurethane foam, but not for the Birch mattress. They use things like organic wool, which is naturally flame resistant, and organic cotton. 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It's really easy to set up, but they do also offer in-home setup and removal of your old mattress if you need that. It's so simple and honestly, it could be life-changing for you, so go to the link in the description and check it out. We got all of our mulching done out by the raised beds. Honestly, I am a little bit sad that we did not get the grapes done with the actual wood mulch. I was really looking forward to having that done. I'm just kind of afraid that the weeds are going to start growing with this nice warm weather, and I really wanted to have a good mulch down before that happens, but we'll get it figured out. And for now, we're moving on to a fun project. We're planting the first seeds of the season outside. First things first, I'm going to take all the glass off, wash these windows, and then there is a really, really nice crop of chickweed growing in here, also the dead nettle. So I'm just going to have to pull that out. I think that is honestly the nicest chickweed I've ever seen in my life. I'm just going to have to get that all out. My chickens are going to love all of that chickweed. It'll make their eggs high in vitamins. This cilantro made it through the entire winter. Check that out. It is happy and alive down there. That's the only thing though in these beds that made it. This chickweed worked as a beautiful ground cover over the winter. I am going to be experimenting with some different lettuces this year. Normally, I keep it really simple and I have kind of my go to's, but this year I'm just going to do a couple extra fun things. In this first bed right here, I'm going to do some arugula. Cody's been grilling lots of steaks and arugula goes really well with grilled steaks, so we'll do a whole bed for him. So just kidding about planting a whole bed of arugula. There was barely any seeds in this packet, so I should have just gotten more ounces, but I didn't know. So anyways, we'll do one row of arugula. I also got some butter crunch. It's like a butter head lettuce. I'm going to fill out the rest of this bed with this. It just sounded really good to me. It sounded juicy and crunchy and buttery. A lot of people ask me where I get these tags. If you order your seeds from Berlin Seed, the tags are like inside the packet. I have the best success when direct seeding lettuce with just planting it nice and heavy and then you can always thin it later. Lettuce is one of those things that I always start outside. I never start lettuce and kale and arugula and things like that inside. They germinate really, really well outside and to me there's just really no point in taking up that space indoors because you can plant them very early and then as soon as it gets warm, they'll come up. I just very lightly cover the seeds. You don't want to plant lettuce seeds very deep because it's just a very, very tiny seed. I'm going to save this middle section right here for dill. I have dill started inside. You can direct seed dill but I've tried it the past couple years and it just doesn't come up. I am going to be putting some kale up on the porch in container garden in my container garden but I still think I'm going to put a little bit down here and then I'm also going to be doing a lettuce. It's a leaf lettuce called New Red Fire. It looks really good. Never tried it before. Normally I plant red Russian kale. That's by far my favorite kale. It's very tender and it's not glossy and shiny and rubbery like most normal kales but a lot of the kale that I used last year, I froze and so it's nice to have a more hardy kale for freezing. So I decided to try this dwarf blue curled kale this year. It looks really good. Cody hates kale and my kids hate kale but we have a soup called Zupa Toscana that they love kale in so it's just not the same without the kale. Come on. Okay, New Red Fire. I hate these seed packets. I've got one more lettuce here that I'm gonna try and that is Ariana. I think I might have tried this one before. I'm not sure. It's a Batavian lettuce. This bed over here, I like to just let it go and then it just reseeds itself with cilantro every year. I am a little bit concerned. I threw compost on here last year and there was chickweed seeds in the compost so I pulled a whole bunch of chickweed and hopefully this cilantro will still reseed. No matter how moist your soil is, I always, always, always water in seeds. Always, always, always. I cannot overemphasize that. It helps to get the soil into really good contact with the seed and that is going to make all the difference with germination. One thing I really like to do with these windows is in the springtime when there's warm days and cold days, I like to just leave a couple cracks here and there so that the air can, just for some ventilation, because the glass, the sunshine through the glass can get really hot and concentrated under there. This whole project, planting this cold frame, took me about 30 to 40 minutes to seed and water everything, put the windows on, and this is going to give us salad for months. It's so, so worth it. Barely any weeding either. I am a big planner. I really like to have everything planned out ahead, know exactly what's going to happen, what's going on. So this past week I have been sketching out my garden. I like to do this every single year. This is very rough and unprofessional, but this is my garden from 2024 and then this is this year's garden and I just wrote out last year's garden so that I could look at it and make sure I don't plant anything in the same place this year as I did last year. I am a firm believer in crop rotation. I'm definitely not a purist with crop rotation. I don't really worry about what vegetable follows what vegetable. I just like to make sure that especially disease-prone veggies or bug-prone veggies don't go in the same spot every year. I've had both of these gardens, this front garden and then my garden out there, for around 10 years so I know the soil in these gardens really, really well and I really like to choose the spots where I plant things according to the kind of soil in the different places in my garden. So even out there in that garden, the soil isn't all completely the same. Some of it is still more compacted than other places. So for root veggies like potatoes and carrots, my staple crops that I'm really concerned about, I like to plant those in the softest soil because root veggies are going to do so much better in soft soil. I might talk about this just a little bit more later, but raised beds make crop rotation super, super easy. I love them for that reason. Last year up in this garden, I had mostly onions and carrots. This year, I'm going to do onions and carrots up here as well. I'm just going to swap them. This garden up here doesn't get quite as much sun as the garden out there and I can grow most everything up here, but tomatoes and things are definitely going to do better in the garden out there. So light is also something that you really want to think about when you are figuring out what crops to put where. It's so funny because even just like walking out here, I can see the different kinds of soil in my garden. This soil right here is much lighter and I can tell that it's much more clay-like, a little bit rocky. And then this soil over here is really black and really loose. The reason for this is that right here, this huge section right here was all asparagus for about, I don't know, was it seven or eight years? And I didn't do much composting and stuff, so I really wasn't bettering this soil while all this other soil was being used more and I was bettering it every year. So in this section right here, I'm going to plant something this year that I don't really care about quite as much. Last year, I did this in dried beans. They did super well, but it wasn't like potatoes that I was really, really depending on. This whole space right here last year was where my white potatoes were grown and this soil is like prime soil. So I always do some of my staple crops in this little plot right here. Some of this planting, this rough planting, is also subject to change, but I really just like to have a good idea of where things are going before I start planting. Because once planting season hits, I like to have exactly in my head the space where I'm putting each vegetable and I can do each vegetable separately and still know that everything's going to come out right in the end. This of course is my strawberry patch. It's coming around to the time where I should just replant the whole patch. I like to do that about every three years. I think I'm going to let these go another year without replanting them though. Crop rotation is really simple in raised beds. That's one of the reasons that I just love raised beds so much. One thing I really like to do is if I'm going to have like multiple beds with the same crop in them, so let's say I want to have two beds full of broccoli, I will have one bed of broccoli over here and another one all the way at the other end because broccoli is something that's very prone to pest issues and so I just like to mix things up and it kind of confuses the bugs a little bit. I keep very close track of what I had last year in each of my beds. So in this bed, last year I had butternut squash. So this year I'm not going to plant cucumbers or squash or anything that's susceptible to the same disease or bug issues as butternut squash in this bed. So I'll probably do broccoli in this bed or sweet potatoes or something like that. And I also try to have anything like butternut squash, cucumbers, I like to have those far apart. So I'll probably plant zucchini up in the front garden, some cucumbers on this side, and then some squash on the other side. I just really like to mix things up. It really helps to make so that disease issues don't get super, super bad. Another one of my very favorite things about these raised beds is look at this soil. It's absolutely perfect. The soil in my in-ground garden is definitely too wet and soggy yet to plant anything in, but these beds are perfect and so raised beds are always my go-to for spring crops like broccoli because you can just get in there so quickly. We have another whole like month and a few days before our last frost date so obviously I can't be planting anything out here. So excited to bring you guys along this year as I plant my garden, but while you're waiting for those videos to come you can check out this video right here that shows us building my cold frame that I just planted my salad greens in. How do you do that? I was gonna say chicken salad but then it sounds like actual chicken salad. Salad for the chickens. Must we make it so difficult to open a seed packet you