Today I finally sat down to plan the garden. A lot of people talk about doing this in January, but here in Minnesota it's hard to get into that when it's just so.far.away yet. But now it's April, it's snowing like crazy, and it is time to put the plans that have been formulating in my head down on paper.
Above is the front yard garden. This is the sunniest side of the house, so two years ago we put in these 4x4 foot square boxes. We have always followed the Square Foot Gardening method, but in our 13 years of marriage these are the first "true" SFG boxes we've done. They even have the grid made of lathing strips to mark off each sqare foot. I was so proud when we put these in. My anal retentive tendencies have a field day with this sort of organization and planning. Thanks, Mel Bartholomew! You can see in the picture there is an apple tree in the middle of the four squares. This is "my" apple tree (Regents) and it was planted last summer. The other three family members have their own trees, two apples (George and Rose's) on the north side yard and one sour cherry (Eli's) in the backyard. We like to have our own trees here, or at least I do. Gives me a sense of ownership and pride in "my" tree.
One front bed is entirely planted with herbs, most of which come back year to year. The other bed nearest the street is entirely strawberries. The two back beds, which get more shade as the sun goes over the house, gets various plantings. Tomatoes and peppers do okay in there. Greens, peas, cabbage, salad lettuces, beets, etc. do better as they can take some shade.
Because this year we want more garden for more staples, we're more than doubling (possibly tripling) the vegetable garden space this year, as well as adding a row of fruit hedge along the South side of our backyard's fence. We "found" a spot in the backyard which we think will get enough sun for the new veggie plot. Formerly this spot (below) held a sandbox made of an old, huge tractor tire and painted cornflower blue, as well as a hammock and the Curly Willow tree which will be replanted soon. Oh, and the raised area was full of large field rocks interplanted with fairly ugly "rock garden"-type plants. Always full of weeds, hard to take care of.
We "freecycled" the rocks to a young couple that will put them along their river shoreline. The plants still have to go, hopefully at a plant sale/giveaway I will host in May. Once today's snow is gone (it's supposed to be 70 degrees F. on Tuesday already!), I will dig up those plants and put them in pots.
Then it's time to add the layers of compost, newspaper, and straw mulch to the whole bed, even the paths will get newspaper and straw. I was starting to put compost down yesterday but didn't get very far because of the mouse running around in the bin. He has called our black plastic composter home all winter, according to George. Warm and full of food scraps, what more could a mouse want? Poor guy, he couldn't get out with me standing there and poor me, I couldn't keep going with a mouse running around. I'll let George take care of him soon!
We are combining the Square Foot Gardening method back here with a bit of Lasagna Gardening technique. Lasagna Gardening (Mother Earth News article about it here) just layers down the compost (even not fully broken down stuff), newspapers, mulch, etc. and plants right on top of it. No tilling, no digging, soil becomes very loose and loaded with nutrients because of all the healthy inputs that break down into it. It's a "no-work" garden method we're happy to try!
You can see in the very top photo that I used graph paper to plot out this garden space too. I actually made one drawing of the garden on graph paper, then photocopied a few to use in other years or if we do succession planting this year (also a SFG method, planting more than one crop successively as the season of plant, harvest, plant again, harvest again rolls on).
It's so easy to plan your garden in squares of one foot each. In the picture is the page in Mel's book that says how many of each different type of plant goes in each square foot. Makes it even easier! I highly recommend this book, the older version or the newer (we have both). Even just one 4x4' square can grow a lot of food in a season.
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