It is still raining here in Northern Kentucky. Officially this month we have had 13.52 inches of rain, which is a new all time record for April. The record amount of precipitation for any month is 13.68 inches, set in January, 1937. Since its raining today, we just may break that one too!
Since it has been raining so much, I haven't been able to work in the garden much. Instead, I've been having fun planning out the vegetable garden with an excel spreadsheet that I made this winter. You can't read anything, but here is a picture of the entire garden layout:
Represented in the above picture, is all of the places in the yard that I will be growing fruits and vegetables except one peach tree and a grape vine.
The bulk of it is what I usually consider "the garden", which has two main sections. The uphill section, on the right side in the pictures, is mostly raised beds. That is the section where I use intensive techniques like succession planting, intercropping and companion planting.
The downhill side, on the left in the above picture, is a mixture of raised beds and direct ground plantings. Down there I only plant one thing in any given spot for the whole season. Things that need a bit more space go there, like pumpkins, gourds and corn. It's also where I plan to do my experiments with tomatoes, like trying to grow the largest tomato and trying to grow the tallest plant. So here is a closer picture of these two sections, minus the greenhouse, chicken coop, fruit trees and all the side beds of fruit or tomatoes.
As for describing my plans for each specific area, I'll break that up into two posts. The next post will show the left side with the things like gourds, corn and tomato experiments, as well as all of the island beds and fruit.
In this post, I will emphasize the beds on the right, uphill side. Here are the main eight beds. The beds on the left are 4'x12' and the ones on the right are 4'x10'.
That's still too wide of a view to easily read the vegetable names, so I'll show just two beds at a time. This first pic is the two of the beds that I have been showing in my Movie Mondays. They have peas, onions, and lettuce in them. The pea/lettuce bed will eventually get bush cucumbers added, and the onion/lettuce bed will have Bell Peppers added when the weather gets warm. The scale I'm using is 6" equals one square.
The other bed that I show in Movie Mondays is just above these two. It has broccoli and lettuce in it now and will get a stake and weave row of paste tomatoes added to it.
The bed above that will be exclusively tomatoes; Indeterminate Beefsteak in the back with stake and weave support, and caged or staked Determinate tomatoes in front. If you are still confused with the difference between Determinate and Indeterminate tomatoes, see this post.
To the left of these beds are beds #2 and #4 that also largely will host tomatoes. These beds are slightly larger at 4'x12'. At least in the drawing, I am cramming these plants in every two feet. At planting time, I may space them out a bit more and lose one or two plants per row. Bed two is just like bed 1 with the taller tomatoes in the back row and the shorter ones in front.
Bed 4 will get a row of heirloom tomatoes in back and two or three rows of bush beans in front.
The last two beds in this section of the garden are mainly for squash, although I will tuck onion sets or lettuce seedlings in before the squash plants get big. The squash that I plan to grow in these beds are zucchini, yellow crook neck squash, spaghetti squash and acorn squash.
In my next post, I will cover the rest of garden and what I plan to plant.
Have a great weekend!
- Marc
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