Homestead Garden, Goals, and Plans

A lot has changed on the homestead over the past several years and I’m going to share a brief homestead garden update on our garden plans, various homestead updates, and seed list for the new year.

While, I’ve shared some of the things we are growing, I haven’t gone into too many specifics for which variety of plants we are growing.

Although, I’ve had some requests for specific varieties that have done well for us. So, in this post I will dive a bit into some of the varieties that we are growing to help you with getting your garden established in the upcoming garden season.

And for reference, we are in zone 5a in north central Nebraska.

The winter months are my favorite times to sit down and plan out our homestead & garden goals for the new year. I’m sure many of you can relate!

Currently we are buried deep in snow (we recently got 18” from one storm!) but you can sort of see the raised garden beds peeking up from under the snow. (see the pictures below)

And, we are expecting another 9-17” (depending on how this storm moves) this week! This is definitely uncharacteristic for us!

So, to say I’m dreaming of spring is a little understatement!

Our favorite seed catalogs have arrived and we sat down with our garden planners & journals (this is what I use) to dream up plans.

This year, things are changing for our garden. And so, I have many new to us varieties that I will share as well as some repeat favorites.

Garden recaps

We have been at this new homestead for going on 4 years now. Before then we were gardening at a rental home. I’m going to share a brief recap of how the gardens have gone thus far.

One of the biggest challenges that we face in this area is that this space was an old cattle pasture. It also has some areas of soil that needs amending. Some areas are clay and others are sandy.

Year 1 (2020) – storms and a small tornado wiped out my garden, our orchard, and took my beloved greenhouse and several of my favorite David Austen roses. I replanted again with garden starts from the nursery and Azure Standard. And then another storm and hail damaged the garden. So, that was it for that year. 😅

Year 2 (2021) – the garden was thriving, best year yet! And we started converting the in ground beds to raised beds.

Year 3 (2022)– last year our focus was on structures. We worked on restructuring the garden areas by removing old brush and moving archways and fencing in the entire yard. We also worked on extending the chicken run.

Year 4 (2023) – this year, we are adding several (about 8-10) more raised beds using our favorite OLLE Gardens beds. We are still planning the layout, but this will double our raised beds to around 18-20! We are adding new trees to the orchard area. It will also be moved to a new location to hopefully get better established & slightly protected from the high winds that we have.

We are also adding a new dwarf orchard to the potager garden.

Homestead goals

As I mentioned, there are many changes coming. First and foremost is in relation to this blog. It is niching down more to a homestead & garden blog again!

The food portion of the site is slowly moving back over to my old food blog, Olive & Artichoke. Some recipes will remain, but those will be for garden preservation, fermenting, homestead related recipes only.

Over the years, we’ve had a lot to manage in our personal lives. I was on bedrest with my last pregnancy and since it was high risk, I needed an operation 4 1/2 hours from home.

At the same time, my father-in-law was suffering with a form of leukemia and passed away. My husband had to take on a lot of extra duties on the ranch and for our family.

So the homestead goals and blog work were put to the side while we focused on our family and various other circumstances.

I’m sharing this now that it’s been a few years since we went through these trials and crosses because I hope to help & encourage you. ♡ We have moved a lot over the years, we have put our homestead growth plans on hold.

Very slowly, we’ve been able build our homestead dreams… a little bit over time.

And so, I firmly believe that anyone can achieve their homestead goals. It does take determination, flexibility, and reevaluating goals.

✨ Are you new to homesteading or still dreaming of building yours? I have tons of information for you in this homesteading for beginners post!

Plant list by garden area

How I set up our garden initially gives us room to extend it a little over time. And each of our garden spaces has it’s own name which I’ll refer to in this post to help explain the layout better.

In the future, I’ll have my husband take his drone out to get an aerial view of the garden layout.

My goals with the garden areas are to be my version of a secret garden with the pathways and structures to lead to the cottage and cut flower gardens. And also to have bit of Mr. McGregor’s garden from the Beatrix Potter books.

The cottage & cut flower gardens

This area of the garden will be expanded with a couple of new raised beds that are reserved for cut flowers. Last year I added a few varieties of flowering trees, bushes, and rose bushes. We also planted a hedge row of dappled willows and some varieties of dogwood.

Herb garden plants

In this part of our homestead garden, we grow a variety of both medicinal and culinary herbs. Most of our current varieties, we’ve had for so long that I don’t remember the specific names.

Vegetable (potager) garden plants

This year in the main part of the potager, we are adding a few more varieties to both the spring and summer plants.

Generally we grow a few of each of our favorite veggies.

Tomatoes

We are pretty serious about our tomatoes! Last year we grew 8 different varieties of tomato plants to experiment with some different flavors. And this year we are growing 5 new varieties.

These are one of my favorite things to preserve and a favorite method is to dehydrate tomatoes.

Peppers

Just about as serious about peppers as we are about tomatoes. Generally, we grow typical bell peppers and some hot peppers. Each year we are trying new hot and sweet peppers to find our favorites.

Leeks & onions

Leeks and onions are another favorite that grows really well for us and is an absolute staple in the garden. And we’ll be adding these to our spring garden starts.

Brassicas

A variety of brassicas are always a staple for both our spring and fall gardens. We also do have to battle cabbage worms. So this year, I’m planning on adding row covers to help minimize this.

Root veggies

Another staple! Our favorite root veggies are carrots, radishes, beets, and of course potatoes!

We have been most successful with using grow bags for growing potatoes vs growing in the ground. And it is so much easier! After learning from the master, Monty Don, this is the only way that I will grow potatoes now.

We started with using grow bags that weren’t fabric, but they still worked really well. We added these grow bags in a 10 gallon size and they also worked well. But we are going to increase to 15 gallon bags this year.

This year, we are converting over to these cloth grow bags and adding in additional bags to a total of 15 grow bags of potatoes and sweet potatoes.

Squashes / cucumbers / eggplants

We only grow a small amount of summer and winter squash. And not too many cucumbers, but we are growing a few for canning pickles and relish.

I would love to know what some of your favorites are for your home garden! Did you see anything on our list that you want to try to grow this year? Share below in the comments!