Planning the garden for 2024: Trying to embrace my more chaotic side

This morning, another abnormally warm February morning, I went outside to fill up the bird feeders. I have to do this a couple times a week: fill up the two hanging feeders, add new suet cakes, and dump a bunch of sunflower seeds on the old stump. The doves, goldfinches, cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, squirrels, and bunnies that frequent my yard eat them voraciously, and it makes me happy to see them land en masse to eat both the seeds I put out, and the deadheads of my echinacea flowers from the summer. This time I also put out woodpecker-specific suet, hoping to entice a couple of them that hang out in the nearby copse to hop over.

As I was topping everything off, I noticed that the warm weather has got the compost pile smelling a little ripe, so I grabbed the fork and started turning it, exposing all the black soil developing inside it. The pile doesn’t freeze, since decomposition creates heat, but it’s also not as hot as I would like, which leads to the smell. It’s really only noticeable when you’re right beside it, but I’m hoping that turning it brought more oxygen into the centre of it all, which should speed up the process and throw more heat and cut down on any odours.

And as I was doing all that, I felt it setting in: garden fever.

This happens every spring, and I don’t think other gardeners are unfamiliar with it. It seems to happen around the same time every year, when the first hints of spring begin to emerge. A couple warm days, some sun on your face, melting snow exposing the soil for the first time in a couple months, and there it is: the overwhelming urge to plant all the things.

In years past, this would be the time that I’d pull out a notebook with my not-quite-to-scale diagram of my yard, and start meticulously planning where all my future plants will go, broken up into a one square foot grid. I’d carefully plot out how much room the tomatoes take, where to put down rows of carrots, how to make sure the beans have space. And frankly, the idea of doing that again this year kind of bores me.

Last year, after precisely planting all of my seedlings according to plan, a number of them failed to flourish. There are a bunch of reasons for it: the soil badly needed to be amended and I hadn’t, one of the beds gets way too much sun and heat and was burning its plants to crisps, and the weather was odd last year with a super hot spring and then cooler, wetter June (weird weather patterns being just a reality of gardening in the era of a climate emergency). Sometime in June or July, I threw caution to the wind and dumped a bunch of nasturtium and radish seeds into all the blank spaces, just to fill it for the rest of the year.

They exploded. Of everything I’d tried to grow, they did the best by far, filling their space and sheltering neighbouring plants. Nasturtiums and radishes are super easy to grow so it’s not surprising, but it also made me realise the value of being a little more chaotic. The giant nasturtium plants ended up covering all the exposed soil around the eggplants, which in turn helped retain moisture so the eggplants produced more. The radishes kept the weeds down by not giving them any room to grow. I didn’t thin or prune or manage them at all—I just let them go, and they rioted up to the sun.

The overly-planned layout last spring.

What’s more, I liked how it looked so much more than my neatly laid-out rows. I took pictures of the nasturtiums every morning, and revelled in the treasure hunt of pushing them aside to search for eggplants I might have missed. That corner of the garden, where chaos reigned, ended up being the corner that brought me the most joy all year. 

Which, duh. A quick look at my Pinterest garden inspo board makes it pretty obvious that that’s the style of gardening that speaks to me. So this year, I’m going to try to put aside all of my overly A-type planning tendencies, and be more chaotic with my planting. I have my seeds already, and I’ll sow as much as I can indoors, but come planting time I’ll put seedlings wherever they’ll fit. I want to mix flowers in too to attract pollinators, and I’ll try to follow companion planting guidelines, but I don’t want to be too specific.

Not my photos—inspiration from my Pinterest board.

Come mid-July, the garden always starts to feel like a chore—it’s like I hit garden burnout and just kind of give up. I think a big part of that is that it stops being fun and becomes an endless cycle of watering, weeding, and pruning. The insects get in, the diseases get in (curse you forever, powdery mildew), and I get tired of dealing with it. But I think chaos gardening is a good experiment to overcome it. A more crowded garden will retain water better and keep the soil cool, will keep weeds out, and will force plants to grow more vertical for light. It’ll also just be prettier, and that’s a big part of what I love about it.

So that’s the plan for 2024: less planning. As we get closer to actually getting hands in soil, I’ll obviously have to make some decisions about how to lay things out, but for now we’re keeping it loose and dreaming of an overwhelming, overflowing garden.

Until next time.