Spring Planting/Square Foot Gardening

I haven't written in a while.  I didn't feel like I had anything interesting to write about.  Then I realized that I have been spending an inordinate amount of time planning my vegetable garden, learning how to compost, and building raised beds.  Which I find pretty interesting.  So I thought I would write a little about that.

This is a picture of our garden mid-summer last year.   It was our first vegetable garden.  We had one raised bed with peppers and tomatoes.  And a hanging planter with strawberries.  I also planted some broccoli, but I don't really want to talk about that.  Anyway - it was SO exciting to watch our veggies grow, and to watch the kids actually eat the veggies we had grown, that we  decided to expand our garden this year. 

We plan to have at least three raised beds.  I am still playing around with my planting configuration, but I know that one of the beds will be dedicated to peppers and tomatoes.  In the other two beds I hope to grow lettuce, spinach, carrots, radishes, bush beans, corn, zucchini and maybe eggplant and broccoli.  We are also growing sunflower seeds.  It sounds like a lot of planting for only three beds, but you can squeeze a lot more plants into a raised bed than you can a traditional garden bed.  Also, this year I discovered square foot gardening, which tells you exactly how many of each kind of plant you can plant within a square foot of a raised bed.  I had no idea I could plant SIXTEEN carrot plants in one little square!  There are charts explaining square foot gardening all over the internet.

We live in zone 5.  This means that we need to wait to plant many of our plants until Memorial Day.  But I have planted seeds for some cold-tolerant plants.  I hope to see lettuce, spinach, radish, arugula and carrot sprouts coming through the dirt in the next few days!  Fingers crossed!  Last year, the only seeds I planted were spinach seeds, which yielded me a great big NOTHING. 

Okay, I am off to read more about composting!

Love, 40