We’ve been resting up around here a little after the fall garden, and making big plans for the coming year. We’ll be tilling up more yard this year to accommodate everything, and we’ll be placing a special emphasis on preservation and storage. We’re planning lots of companion planting and will experiment with row covers to protect against cabbage moths and vine borers.
Here’s the space. It doesn’t look like much right now – sad, unkempt, wet. We want to focus a little bit more on aesthetics this year as well as productivity, so we’ve been talking about putting a real fence around it, possibly a white picket fence, which may still need to have rabbit guard stapled inside. We’ll see.
Right now the garden (in my mind anyway) is divided into three separate plots:
Plot 1: was freshly tilled up this past July and this is where my fall garden was planted in '09. It was mostly brassicas, and about a 1/3 of it was not planted with much of anything at all.
Plot 2: This was the '09 summer garden. It was planted primarily with potatoes on one end and tomatoes on the other, with peppers and a few root veggies mixed in. Turnips were the only brassicas in this section, and there weren't very many of them. I’ll do all my brassicas in this plot this year; what you see listed in the spring, and then probably exactly the same in the space below it for the fall.
Plot 1: was freshly tilled up this past July and this is where my fall garden was planted in '09. It was mostly brassicas, and about a 1/3 of it was not planted with much of anything at all.
Plot 2: This was the '09 summer garden. It was planted primarily with potatoes on one end and tomatoes on the other, with peppers and a few root veggies mixed in. Turnips were the only brassicas in this section, and there weren't very many of them. I’ll do all my brassicas in this plot this year; what you see listed in the spring, and then probably exactly the same in the space below it for the fall.
Plot 3: This is the grassy area in the foreground of the picture above that has not been tilled up yet. Here’s where most of our heavy feeders this year – tomatoes and potatoes and some corn, as well as a few other things will go in. We’re planning a LOT of tomatoes and potatoes.
All three plots are approximately 20 feet x 40 feet.
This picture shows all three plots laid out side by side as they will actually exist.
Here are the larger views of each individual plot, in hopes that you can read what will go where. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about crop rotation and companion planting. Things may seem a little weird, especially in garden plot 1, but I’m trying to make sure that I’m planting the right thing after what was in there this past fall. I’ll be writing a little about each crop we plan to grow as we finalize our plans.
In plot 1, where you see the squares with Xs inside, I'm contemplating getting some garden obelisks for the peas, beans, cucumbers and possibly some squash. I'm still up in the air on that we'll see.
We’re still eating primarily our own vegetables from the freezer (green beans, yellow squash, and all kinds of greens) as well as our sweet potatoes. We’re also eating our own green tomato relish, which is just great. We ran out of canned tomato products well over a month ago, and I very much miss them. I also miss having our own potatoes. Hence the heavy emphasis on preservation and storage for this year.
That's it for now. I'll be checking back in when we decide what varieties of everything we'll be growing, what we'll be starting from seed and when, and what we'll get as transplants.
