Posted by maco on February 24, 2015 at 16:16 and edited at March 23, 2015 at 02:33
PermalinkI've got seeds either on-hand or ordered for just about everything I'm starting from seed this year. I've been working out what I want to plant, and this is the plan I've come up with for the 72 square feet of my backyard raised beds:
Key:
- 00: arugula
- 01: basil (sweet)
- 02: beet (Detroit dark red)
- 03: cabbage
- 04: cauliflower (Early snowball)
- 05: cucumber (pickling)
- 06: eggplant (black beauty)
- 07: eggplant (long purple)
- 08: garlic
- 09: kale (vates)
- 10: lettuce (buttercrunch)
- 11: onion (evergreen bunching)
- 12: oregano
- 13: parsley
- 14: hungarian wax pepper
- 15: bell pepper
- 16: Mesclun salad blend
- 17: zucchini
- 18: yellow summer squash
- 19: butternut squash
- 20: sweet potato
- 21: tomato (Opalka)
- 22: super sweet 100 tomato
Beets are fast enough (only 2 months) that I figure I can safely interplant them with the squashes.
I also picked up some chamomile seeds yesterday. I like chamomile tea, and it'll help attract pollinators. I have what I intend to be a food forest further back in my yard, past the raised beds, and I think it can go in there, around the berry bushes I intend to plant this spring.
4 comments
Your garden looks exciting! How do you make a map like you did? that seems very helpful..
I used Smart Gardener. It's a freemium service, and I bought the "square foot gardening layout" addon, which gives more options for how you want plant-spacing to work. Some of those square feet have one plant, some have 16. There's a key I didn't screenshot and post that tells me how many I need of everything to fill the areas I've designated. You can either tell it which way is north and your location (because hemispheres and climates) and then have it generate an arrangement for you, or you can drag things around yourself.
I have no idea why my screenshot taken from the print view (because in edit view it's too big to fit on one page) jogs the grid over half-a-square inside the beds.
Are you going to allow for crop rotation? Or have you just decided what your first rotation looks like?
This is actually my second year in this garden, so this is rotation number 2. Last year, the tomatoes were in the bed that has cucurbits this year. There were cucurbits in there too, but they were all at the bottom end of the bed, so there's some slight movement shifting them to the top. The sweet potatoes were on the bed that's off to the side, last year. This year, that bed's brassicas.
In the fall, I'll add another bed to the bottom end of each row, and that'll give me a 3-year rotation for the column on the left (nightshade, cucurbits + sweet potato, legumes) which is where the permanent trellises go. I don't know what I'll put in the non-trellised beds for rotating, but I will be adding a second bed so the brassicas can move out of that one next year. At worst, this year's brassica bed goes fallow next year. This is my first year planting brassicas.