Garden Plan for 2011

I mentioned in the last post that we are going to "ramp up" to our full homestead plan. We still have a lot of exterior work to do on the house, so we are going to focus half of our energy on that and the other half on the garden.

After Ashley is finished with school, she is going to work on painting the exterior of the house. She will start in mid-April, and will hopefully be finished when she takes her boards, sometime around the end of July. Her parents are both going to visit during the summer and help her paint! We are also going to put a split-rail fence around the sides and back of the property, re-build the small porches, construct the front porch deck, and put new roofs on the bay windows. All of that will take place this summer. In April and May, we will need to construct the garden and do some work on the lawn.

We are planning to construct the full garden, but will only plant a portion of it. In addition, we are only going to plant one of the plots of wheat. The garden plan is shown below.

It's kind of hard to read the labels, so I will walk you through the plan. At the top-left are bush beans, below the beans are bell peppers and jalapenos. To the right of the beans and peppers are cucumbers (in frames), with spinach in the shade of the cucumbers. At the top-right are tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and carrots. In the two plots at the right of the picture are lettuce along the bottom and onions in a row across the middle of the plots. There is parsley in the top plot and basil in the bottom. The plot in the bottom-left if full of assorted herbs, and the other two plots are both potatoes. There is still some space left in the garden for future years. The long plot at the left will one day hold blackberries, and the long plots at the right will hold grapes and raspberries. As I mentioned in the previous post, we will also have a couple of peach trees one day. We think this plan will be plenty for us to deal with this season.

We have already started the early seeds indoors (the last frost date for our area is May 20). Once the seeds begin to sprout (about a week or so), I will post on their progress. Comments are welcome as always!

References

We have been using several references for our garden planning:

• Vegetable Gardening by Fern Marshall Bradley and Jane Courtier. This book is a great reference for just about any vegetable, from lettuce and tomatoes to artichokes, kohlrabi, and scorzonera. It includes information on planning, preparation, planting, care, harvesting, and storing.
• Gardening in New York by Andre & Mark Viette is a great resource for us, since neither one of us is from this area. Not only does it include info on vegetables, but also annuals, lawns, perennials, shrubs, trees, groundcovers, and water plants. The book is a month-by-month reference that walks us through the entire process for each of these types of plants. It will be a useful reference for years to come.
• Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte is a reference on companion gardening. It has great information on which plants to plant together and which plants to keep far apart. For tomatoes, for instance, it tells you that they should not be planted near any member of the cabbage family or potatoes, that they will protect asparagus from the asparagus beetle, that garlic will protect them from the red spider mite, and that they should only be watered from beneath.  Another great resource!