Start your garden planning by your belly.

Save time in your garden. Save money by only planting things you’ll eat. Have less food waste which saves you time, money, and resources. Follow these 5 steps for a simple way to plan your garden from your kitchen.

1. What are you eating for dinner?

You’ll notice that you eat like ingredient foods. For instance, we eat lots of meals with tomatoes. Such as meals with noodles, meatballs, chili, etc. These all have tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic in common.

You can quickly see what meals you’ve eaten for the past few weeks to get an accurate idea of what type of food you eat for your main meal. You’ll start seeing some common foods, herbs, vegetables, fruits, etc. that show up again and again.

Then look at other meals you create for your family. In our house, it’s breakfast. Once again, onions and garlic are used. We eat leftovers for lunch, so I don’t need to look at that meal for specific food to grow.

Once you’re done looking at your meals, identify other home-grown items that are staples in your house, like potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, etc.

2. Check out your kitchen refrigerator and freezer.

Look in your refrigerator and freezer. What homegrown items are you buying? Why are you buying them? It could because you didn’t grow enough of them. Or that it’s the off season, and you wanted some fresh food. Note what you have and what you wish you had more of.

3. Check out your pantry.

What do you have in your pantry? If you store your garden food, such as canning, freeze-drying, dehydrating, etc. Look at what you’re eating and what you’re not. Knowing what you don’t or don’t eat as much as you grew last time is significant.

For us, we’re running low on carrots. I noticed we had butternut squash from several years ago that is still on the shelves. We detest canned butternut squash, but we love it fresh. This means I need to only grow the amount I can keep fresh in our dark storage area.

4. What’s in your deep freezers and other dark storage or root cellars?

Even if you mostly have meat in your deep freezers, go look in them. You never know what you’ll find. Plus, the meat might give you ideas on other things you need to grow.

Besides meat, our freezer has berries, some zucchini, and a bag of squash. It was a reminder that we don’t eat squash that isn’t fresh. The chicken necks and feet reminded me I needed more onion and shallots, because I was almost out of both. I use shallots, onions, and garlic when I make bone broth.

5. Go through your seeds and order more.

Now that you’ve gone through all the food areas of your house, you should know what people eat and don’t eat in your house. With your list in hand, go through your seeds and select the ones you want to plant.

If you see something on your list you are short on, order more seeds.

Now that you know what you need to grow, go to your garden and figure out where you’re going to grow everything.