Since moving in to this house, I have know I would have a garden this summer and now I am in the home stretch to planting (our last frost date being around May 3rd.) I have started planting what is going where.
To venture for a moment into my natal chart, my sun and moon sign are in Capricorn. I don’t think you can be anymore of a planner then that, except if Mercury was in Capricorn… oh wait, mine is! The Chinese astrology equivalent to Capricorn is the year of the Ox, guess what year I am born in? I’m doomed to be a planner, I’m telling you.
So yes, I am planning my garden and loving it. I have all but busted out the colored pencils. N that planning is a bad thing when it comes to gardening. Planning insures that you get the most out of your space by finding the empty spaces and working out crop succession. My mother, grandmother and uncle sent me some seeds for Easter so my list of plants has expanded. Anything bold is going in the raised beds, italicized ones are going elsewhere.
- Basil, Genovese
- Carrots, Purple Haze
- Cilantro
- Cowpeas, Pink-Eyed Purple Hulled
- Cucumbers, True Lemon
- Ground Cherry transplant (1)
- Leaf Lettuce, mix (2pkg)
- Moonflowers
- Morning Glories
- Pole Beans, Yard Long
- Poppies, Oriental
- Pumpkins, Big Max
- Snap Beans, Empress
- Radicchio
- Sunflowers, Titan
- Tomato transplants (5)
- Violas, Helen Mount
- Zucchini, Black Beauty
This is the scaled chart of my two raised beds:
I decided on a modified square foot gardening system for the raised beds. I got the idea for the chart from the Kitchen Garden Planner on the Gardener’s Supply Company website. Each 4×4 square on my graph paper is 1sqft, as are all the loose pieces that list each of my crops and how many I can grow per square foot. I am not done yet, especially with bed B since I still need to build an A-frame trellis for my heirloom tomatoes, which will affect placement but I’m almost there.
How about you, do you plan your beds? What system do you use?
