Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

No, silly. Not Christmas. Gardening time!

I'll pause while those of you who don't share my love of all things gardening click the "back" button to read TMZ.

I have not yet blogged about it, but our garden is in full early-spring swing. Chad's new schedule has taken a weekend day from us which means Sundays - at least those without rain - have seen Mandyland knee deep in mud, compost, seeds and worms.

I truly love this time of year.

First things first, we've decided, (and by "we" I mean "me") that we're going to be a bit more aggressive in our gardening pursuits this year. My plan is to eat vegetarian over the summer and fall and try very hard to reduce our store bought produce by at least half.

Chad's still thinking bbq'd steak sounds good with all these veggies.

Joseph wonders if hot dogs are vegetarian.

Elizabeth just says "ghaaa". I'm taking that as a sign of support. After all, we girls must stick together.

We're doing a few things to enlarge our garden. First off, we looked up our lot lines and discovered that we can expand the end of our yard by six feet. I'm going to use all that lovely square footage to plant. We've also decided to utilize our unused back patio for raised beds. Combined with last year's 80' x 1' stretch and the containers, we're looking at an almost overwhelming addition.

Almost overwhelming.

I'm using the amazing garden planner at plangarden.com to help me get my head around what I want to do. I'm still not sure I'm 100% on the whole scale thing. I'm much more...I want to say visual, but that wouldn't make sense considering the whole garden plan is a graphic. Let's just say that once I commence planting and digging, I'll have a better idea of how much of my plan can become a reality. I actually think I'm going to have room for more plants than the graph claims.

Now. In order to prevent a three thousand word description of what I'm planting where, I give you access to my garden plan.

Side note: Apparently there's a way for me to load an actual picture into Blogger, but every time I try, I get an empty box with a little red "x". Help?

It actually appears that I'm open along our back wall and that I still have a bit of space under the window. I need to figure out what can grow, with a semi-shallow root system, in front of the orange tree. Any suggestions?

3 comments:

zannie said...

Nice chart! I've been saving your earlier post about it but haven't gotten around to looking at the site yet. Does it allow you to plan over time? Like, "After I harvest the garlic in July I'll plant beets"?

I don't have enough info to help diagnose your red X problem, but if you right click on it and choose "copy image location," then paste that into a browser address bar, you may (or may not) get some more useful information about what the problem is.

Christine E-E said...

wow! how big is your yard? looks enormous! I'd like to see it sometime. Hope your "code" is getting better.

Anonymous said...

Zannie - I'm still exploring the site's potential. Right now, it's worth it to me not to have to draw out my plan. :D

Christine - My garden is actually quite tiny. I just have a lot of "areas". If it's not moving, I'll stick a veggie in it. :D