February 24, 2009 • 6:24 am
Great planners of history…
I don’t know. Military guys?
Me? Not so much.
But! Even a chronic non planner like me knows that a great garden plan makes for… great garden confusion when you actually try and plant it as you wrote it.
Still.. without further adieu my 2009 plan.
I have other crops to add, but this is basically it. I’m trying to indicate now where I will rotate in and out and how my greens will be staggered. On first glance you might think “Good lord! That’s a lot of peas!” And you’d be right. But I love em! They grow nicely, die off and then make room for more stuff!
Filed under: garden design , garden plans
Yeah so the problem with the shifting dimensions of the garden was with me. Turns out that it’s 21 feet long, but only 20 feet wide. And I dug all kinds of random path sizes in between lots of random row sizes.
But, it’s in damnit! The new plan is shown below with tons of weird dimensions that will require trigonometry and non euclidean geometry to figure out. It’s close enough. Key question…
The tomato plots in the top row are 3 feet long and 4 feet high. I’m wondering if I can cram more tomatoes into that space.. perhaps two in each 3×4 block? What do you think?
Filed under: garden design, vegetable garden , garden design, vegetable garden
Sometimes you’re sure of yourself and sometimes you think “Crap. Did I just rip a hole in my yard?”
I remember last year when the first spot was tilled away. Nice, cute little small spot. And I thought “Guess I better plant stuff now,” as I scratched my head. “No choice. That’s dirt now and not grass.”
The tilling for this year is done and the garden is just a couple hundred square feet bigger. I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew, but it should allow me to grow a lot more of the things I liked the most and add a few new things.
And this time around I wasn’t fully struck by the gaping hole in my yard. It felt better. I think I’m ready. Let’s see what grows this time.
Here’s last year’s patch and the freshly tilled, larger patch for this year:
Filed under: garden design, vegetable garden , tilling, vegetable garden
Okay, okay. 24 X 24 is probably too big for my yard.
Just went out and pulled up last year’s chicken wire fence. Got rid of the landscape fabric that I used to keep the beds separated. And then I measured to see what 24 x 24 looks like compared to 13 x 17.
It looks freaking huge as it turns out.
So, I’ll be going 21 x 21. That will definitely impact what I’ve got planned, but I’ll figure it out.
I do my garden planning on graph paper although I did try some freeware last year. Just couldn’t make it work as nimbly as a pencil. Then I just take my plans and draw them into Excel. Here is the latest plan.
Filed under: garden design, vegetable garden, vegetables , garden design, garden plan, vegetable garden
It’s time I think. Nights are still frequently below freezing here, but spring is definitely here. The lawn is getting green and we’re getting a lot of rain. It’s time to get the garden going.
This year I am expanding. My garden last year was only at 17 x 13. This year it’s going to be 24 x 24 with more traditional rows. This means that I need to pull out the chicken wire fence and start over. I’m not going to create a permanent, nicer fence yet – I want to make sure this year goes well and I’m not exactly sure what the new size is going to mean for sun exposure.
But at any rate, I’ve got tilling to do, compost to add, topsoil to add and trellises to build. No big deal! It can all happen. Next weekend, it’s time to plant.
I’ll be chitting my potatoes tomorrow too. I’ll take pictures and post that.
Filed under: garden design, potato, vegetable garden, vegetables , garden, garden design, vegetable garden, vegetables
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