Holiday Dinners Garden

Rather than rushing to a crowded grocery store at the last minute for holiday meal ingredients, wouldn’t it be nicer to simply walk outside and collect the freshest ingredients possible? You can, with just a little planning.

Christmas dinner party

Creating a holiday dinners garden is a form of planting forward. You know ahead of time what you will need, so you estimate which ingredients should be planted and when. That way they will become harvestable as they are needed. And your holiday dinners garden is not limited to edibles. Seasonal decorations, such as flowers and greenery, can  be found in your yard just as easily.

​This planning process may feel overwhelming, at first. Instead of taking on more than is fun, you might want to select one holiday at a time and build on that over time. Either way, it all starts with a calendar.

Planning calendar (Kaboompics) Public Domain

Create a calendar 

Calendars are handy tools, especially for gardeners. You can use printing paper or an inexpensive paper calendar to design your holiday dinners garden. Start by identifying all the holidays you celebrate each year with special meals. In my family, these holidays are New Years’ Day, Easter, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Mark your family’s holidays clearly on your calendar.
​
Meal planning

We all have favorite dishes for each of our holiday dinners. In my house, New Years’ Day would never feel right without hoppin’ john and Easter wouldn’t feel like Easter without a ham surrounded by baby beets and carrots.

Hoppin' john and Schott's Hots (Kate Russell)

Whatever your traditional meals include, create generic menus for each holiday dinner. For example:

• New Years’ Day - ham, hoppin’ john, collards or some other greens, cornbread 
• Easter - ham, baby carrots and beets, mashed potatoes, green salad
• 4th of July - BBQ ribs, deviled eggs, corn on the cob, guacamole, salsa, watermelon, potato salad, macaroni salad, apple pie
• Thanksgiving - turkey, bread stuffing, wild rice stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, green beans, green salad, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, four nut pie
• Christmas - Cornish hens, mashed potatoes, gravy, Brussels sprouts, green salad, applesauce, persimmons pudding

I do not raise pigs or turkeys in my suburban yard, but including as many of the dishes as I can think of helps me work out the details when figuring out what to plant.

Make a list and check it twice

Using each of the dishes you want to include in your holiday meals, create a shopping list of ingredients that could come from your garden. Be sure to include the date when the ingredients will be needed. Spreadsheets are very handy for this step because this list can get a little unwieldy. You may want to use a separate page for each holiday. Using my menu for the 4th of July, I would start with this:

• BBQ sauce - tomatoes, onions, garlic, thyme, oregano
• deviled eggs - chives, dill, borage flowers
• corn on the cob - corn
• guacamole - avocados, garlic, cilantro
• salsa - tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro
• watermelon
• potato salad - potatoes, onions, bell peppers, celery, dill, garlic, thyme
• pesto pasta - basil, garlic, onions, red and orange bell peppers, thyme, oregano, chives
• apple pie - apples

As you can see, there is some overlap between dishes. [My son, the cook, recently told me that most people have a flavor profile. Apparently, my profile features potatoes, thyme, onions, and garlic!] My avocado tree is not old enough to produce fruit, so I will not include it in my plan just yet. 

Perennial herbs

Nearly all dishes use herbs of one sort or another, so these mostly perennial standbys can be used to create the framework for your holiday dinner garden. The nice thing about perennials is that they are either actively present, or they have been around long enough for you to have canned or frozen some of their harvest.

Common perennial herbs for a holiday dinner might include rosemary, tarragon, and thyme. To make your holiday dinners garden look more attractive and to prevent these frequent members of the mint family from taking over completely, you may want to grow them in containers, placed artfully throughout the garden. Some herbs, such as cilantro, dill, and parsley are not perennials, but they will self-seed once they become established. Others, such as oregano and sage, are perennial in some Hardiness Zones and annuals in others. Once the perennials are in place, you can plan for the annuals.

Spreadsheet magic

I love spreadsheets. To me, they make it easy to keep track of a lot of information. You may or may not feel the same way, but they are very handy for this step in the garden design process. You can start with just one holiday or go whole hog with all of them. For this example, I am only using my 4th of July BBQ, but I am including the date for when I add other holiday dinners.

Sample planting plan for July 4th BBQ in California

In the first column, list each of your ingredients. In the second column, add the date you want each ingredient to mature. The third column is for a note about whether each ingredient is a perennial, already preserved, or how many days it takes from planting seeds to harvest. Keep in mind that days to maturity found online and on seed packets may be different for your region of microclimate. These numbers are simply averages, but they are still useful.

For each ingredient, count backwards from the holiday the number of days to maturity for a planting date. In the example above, my apples ripen long before July 4th, so I freeze or can them. Then, I see that basil takes 50 to 75 days from planting to harvest, so I count back 75 days from July 4th for a planting date of April 21st. Now, my family loves basil and I plant a lot of it, starting long before April 21st, but I add a reminder in my calendar to plant basil on that date so I know I will have plenty when I need it for that holiday.

If your planting date occurs before it is actually warm enough to plant a specific species, you may need to start it indoors, or buy seedlings at a later date.

In some cases, like celery, I could plant it but I choose not to. For me, celery is fiddly to grow and is so inexpensive at the store that it is not worth the garden real estate. You might feel the same way about onions or garlic. A lot of this will depend on where you live and how much time and space you have. Even if you only select 2 or 3 ingredients for each holiday meal, you’ll be glad you did.

Simply go down the list, counting backwards for each ingredient that needs to be planted. You can add these annual reminders to the calendar in your computer and add alerts in your phone.  If you set them to repeat every year, the planning process is done. Before you know it, you will have all the information you need to plant your holiday dinners garden!