Kinda crazy, but I’m already starting to form plans for next year’s garden.  We planted our garlic this weekend, which involved a little planning.  Here’s the plan so far:

I don’t have my 4 beds planned out yet, but I have now lined my three walking spaces with rows of garlic.  I have a great mental picture of how this will look, but will it work out?  I will leave open the space where I had garlic in ’09 and ’10.  The kids helped with the planting:

Parsley on the left behind Anneke and parsnips behind Rowan on the right are the only thing still going on in the garden.  Here’s the garlic we planted:

We picked it up at Kingfield Farmers Market last weekend from Swede Hollow Farms, who are apparently now famous.  (The market is open one more weekend!)  I also tucked a few more plantings here and there in the front yard flower bed.  Should be a big garlic year in 2011.

Here’s a question: anyone ever save pumpkin seeds?  We got a really nice pie pumpkin from our CSA so I thought I might try saving the seeds and planting them next spring.  They are currently drying out on the countertop.  Since I’ll only plant one or two hills at the most, it seems prudent to just save some seeds and save myself a few dollars.

Finally, I think we might take a break from parsnips in 2011.  We still have not had a hard freeze here this year.  But since we’ve had plenty of nights where it got really close to freezing, I started harvesting them this weekend. For the second year in a row, I dug up a bunch of mis-shapen, stunted, many-legged beasts.  It’s my own fault: I let the kids scatter-plant them, they came up in clumps, and I tried to spread them out.  Parsnips HATE to be transplanted.  For two years I’ve tried to ignore that fact, and I can ignore it no longer.

Here’s a little less than half of my total harvest.  A couple of them were perfect. Will I be able to resist the lure of the parsnip next spring?  We made mashed parsnips with these today and they were sublime.