Planting season

 

We are getting ready for the planting season ahead, and if any of you is in the position I was three years ago, you may find useful to look at the next diagrams.

I did not know how to start a garden, and even though my grandmother Josephine had a garden and a lot of canning to do every season,  I was still clueless when it was my time to start one on my own. I would have liked someone experienced to come and work with us for a couple of mornings, in order to establish the main ideas, and also the details which are specific to every ecosystem or climate. Maybe in the future such service can exist.

Instead though I had some lessons from intensive gardening that had been used in areas with restricted amount of land, and I wanted to post them up here. We have adapted them to our particular place and size of our yard, and we hope to keep learning about gardening.

These firsts are drawings on how to do the design of the garden area and prepare the soil. They are self-explanatory:

The stepping stones are there for the gardener to walk comfortably between the rows of produce, to weed and care for the plants. Between the stones, usually there are medicinal, herbal or pest control herbs.

For the actual design of the planting they use a rotation system based on plant families:

And the rows of gardens can look something like these:

For our garden in America's soil, we decided to be more generous in the sizing, and not crowd the plants as much, also we changed the scheme by planting the rows one after the other and keeping the cucumbers and zuchinis somewhere else, since they tend to occupy so much space anyway.

Here is the plot for this year, we will start the seeds indoors in the next few weeks, during April, by our sunny baywindow, and hopefully plant them outdoors by May, when the frost is over.