2012 Plan is Up!

N is a very nice husband.  I have been frustrated to no end trying to post my garden layouts online, so he made a Mathemattica program that let's me draw up my garden to scale and then makes a neat little file that's just the right size for my blog pages.  Isn't he sweet?  Anyway, witness my (his) triumph: 2012 Garden Plan.  The grid scale is about 6 inches.  This is the third revision of the garden plan already, and I haven't yet done a plan for the home garden, so...subject to change!

Growing Things at Home

Me, putting out the basil seedlings.

Keeping up with both my home garden and community garden plot has been harder than I thought.  Somehow I forgot about things that really need to be done, like mowing the lawn and weeding the flowerbeds.  So here are some sort of selective shots of my home garden, and I'll ask you not to peer too closely around the edges.  As you can see, I'm getting a little large to be squatting and bending these days.  Luckily N's interest in gardening is growing with every new thing he eats from the garden, so he's been a big help.

My cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli are all doing quite well under the sheer curtain that used to cover our living room window.  (N tells me I sound pretentious when I say "brassicas", but it is a lot faster to type!)  I took the cover off last week to make sure they weren't getting too little sun, too little water, or too much heat, but I've noticed that some largish-gnat-sized bugs have been fluttering around them a lot, so I may put the cover back on.  I should point out that all of these are foods that I didn't really eat until this pregnancy, but am slobbering all over right now.  I hope I don't lose interest before they produce!

My garlic patch looks very healthy, surprisingly better than the garlic in the containers, which is a little dry around the edges.  We'll see who has the last laugh when they start developing bulbs in their respective soils, though.  There are two varieties here; the hardneck variety in the foreground was noticeably smaller when they stopped growing for the winter (Garlic Progress), but it has definitely caught up.

Overall, the garden is finally starting to look green and not too bare.  I transplanted some peppers in over the weekend, three sweet bell peppers, a chili pepper, and a "kung pao" pepper.  I decided to buy pepper seedlings this year because they take so long to get started and some creature (World's Worst...) ate my first batch.  The great thing about buying them is that you can choose a variety of plants; the bad is that it costs almost as much as if you bought seeds for all those plants and only planted one or two of each.  Almost.

I have completely abandoned the original plan for the home garden in favor of just getting things in the garden.  For example, the basil you see me transplanting above was supposed to go in after the lettuce and spinach, but frankly it was ready to be planted and I am in a hurry now that I'm so close to my due date.  So, I guess I'll put the beans in the cold frame bed once the lettuce is finished.

2011 Garden Plan

ETA: I have put the plan on a separate page that everyone should be able to read.  Check out the link labeled "2011 Garden Plan" up and to the right.  Happy browsing!

I finally finished my garden plan for this year. Hopefully you will be able to see it okay, I've been playing with different ways to display it and haven't been having much success.

2010 Garden Plan Work-In-Progress

Here is a picture of my original plan for the new garden:


It's a little inaccurate in the placement of some daylilies and a blueberry bush, and the grey shaded area isn't quit the right size and shape to represent my pergola and the accompanying bed of coneflowers. Once I had the garden put together and the paths in I decided to update it to this:
You may notice there are still some ?'s in there. I removed a ridiculously small area that I had previously marked for squash, so I had a few extra square feet to distribute. I'm not sure what I'll do with them. Maybe I'll have some extra annual flowers to stick in there, and then I'll have good places to plant fall crops when the time comes. For some reason in the fall I have a hard time making myself pull out plants that are still eeking out a cucumber a week to put in new ones.

Renee Michelle asked in a comment how important it is to have a garden plan. I started to answer, but got long-winded and decided to defer. In fact this is the first year I have ever used a plan - usually I just end up holding a pile of seed packs and standing over my plot scratching my head about where to fit it all in. But then a week or two after planting I end up scratching my head over what exactly I did plant, and where, and did I decide to go ahead and put the beans in or wait a couple more weeks? And if I didn't plant the beans, did I leave room for them? If so, where? Last year I tried a spreadsheet of seeds planted, including variety, location, dates, and notes. But this strategy relied critically on my being willing to fire up the laptop and enter things in a spreadsheet every week or so. I did...pretty good. But when faced with the thought of doing something similar with a garden 2-3 times as big? No. So I have a plan. And the planning part was fun, too! It really brightened up my January!

More Work in the New Plot

Yesterday I moved the rest of the bean teepees into place and N and I figured out what we think is a good way to stake them down - I'll have to go get some fence posts tomorrow. I planted sunflowers, marigolds and cucumbers, and I transplanted my cherry tomatoes and cilantro. Then as it got later it got really cold and window, so I moved my cold frame around the tomatoes for a little wind break.

I also updated the plan for my garden. When I made the plan I made a few guesses about where the existing plants were, so I had to make a few corrections. The new plan still isn't quite right, as the plan is for a rectangular garden plot and my space actually isn't quite rectangular, due to the fence and the sidewalk being slightly misaligned. When I tried to incorporate that into the plan it caused more problems than it solved, so I just made the plan approximate.