First time for me to write into this wonderful garden community. To be honest I will use this post to stop myself from planting and sowing like crazy, because suddenly we have spring and 20 degrees Celsius … and this very deceptive, very deceptive. I already googled long term weather forecast and night with temperatures below zero degree will come again. So, I decided to behave myself and only write about my planting plans instead of putting cucumbers or squash into the earth.
The @needleworkmonday community already knows (huhu lovelies) we rented a garden roughly two years ago. Although the name “garden” my be a tad exaggerated. I will rephrase we rented a huge wilderness full of brambles, poison ivy, old apple trees and no water or electricity. And we are my husband and I, who never had a garden before.
Fun… :-DDDD
roughly two years ago
After a lot of bramble-fighting (which continues to the day) unburying a lot of waste like old lawnmowers or petrol canisters, repairing the shed (which is again hurt because we have crazy storms) I am finally ready to try growing veggies for real.
Many of you may laugh at me and say ‚come on “just plant, no big deal” but you do not know me. I am a mix of perfectionist, gardening noob and animistic being who is afraid to hurt slugs (we have a lot). This does not make the planting easy :-DDD
My go to weapon is always research. I started out with google, worked through some books, and ended completely lost. I became afraid of either violating the rules of mixed culture, crop rotation or permaculture. I became afraid of being too early or too late, of having the wrong soil or using bad seeds… I was frozen in fear. Ok, maybe I am exaggerating a bit. But honestly, I am always in danger of loosing fun because I want to do it „right“.
This year I wanted to be prepared (for my thoughts of impending plant doom) and I again sat down to sketch a planting plan for our 5 patches (which are a mixed bundle: two raised beds, two patches with a not working slug fence and a new mound bed). For the planning I used procreate and I love the app. For all who want to plan gardening digitally I will briefly explain which layers I created, so that I can reuse the plan for the years to come.
First layer are the empty beds. I also included all bigger pots (one „pot“ is a broken rain barrel we found in the garden) and flower boxes.
Second layer are the actual plants I want to grow. Currently this layer is a mix of sketches and writing (sorry, its in German). But I am working on the plan and trying to create a bundle of plant sketches I can reuse every season.
Third layer are the patch numbers, because I found a book with example patches for mixed culture and crop rotation which I customized for our needs. The book uses a system of 10 crop mixes which can be planted successively. So, if you only have one patch, the examples are planted over a period of ten years. I have five, so I need to remember which plant mix is on which patch, so that I can rotate them successfully.
Forth layer gives the time frame for planting. Here I write down when to start sowing at home on the windowsill and when to plant outside.
Fifth layer collects all information about the nutrient supply, which variety of manure or which kind of soil is needed for the plant.
Sixth layer is an overview for me which plants I already have sown. Just a tiny red checkmark, so I know whats are already in the pots or soil.
Did I already mentioned that I am a perfectionist and very frightened to make mistakes?
On the sketch you can see (or not, because some things are written in German) I plan to plant beans, peas, cucumbers, red beet, kohlrabi, zucchini, chard, kale, broccoli, palm kale, several salad varieties, leek, celery, chives, garlic chives, garlic, onions, basil, strawberries (fruit I know, but they are on the veggie patch), topinambur, potatoes, red orach, squash, bell peppers (not yet sketched but already growing on the window sill together with a lot of salad and cabbage varieties) and potentially corn.
It was not easy to apply the patch-designs from the book onto our garden, as I already had things planted the last year…and you know crop rotation and and and but I hope I managed and everything will grow wonderfully and defy the slugs, deer, bunnies, hare, cabbage butterflies, voles and all the other animals which live in the garden (yes, it’s a zoo :-DDD)
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I didn't realise you were in such a rural spot with fields all around! Amazing!
I was reading an article today about orchards, apparently the UK has lost about 80% of its traditional orchards, which are especially important wildlife habitats. (Orchards are areas of land with a minimum of five trees not grown intensively, with grass that is rarely mown or is grazed and with minimal feed/compost etc). I have been thinking about converting the garden on one side of the house to a food forest and, after reading the article today, I am even more interested in doing that. We have a talk next week at the Botanic Garden about the replanting and renovation of the Brook that runs through this area. I'm looking forward to hearing about that what I can learn for a natural/orchard garden.
When I first came to Hive, I came across lots of homesteaders who used chop and drop methods and one post was about just planting things, it seemed, wherever. Suddenly, working in my vegetable garden became much more fun and I stopped worrying so much. The first year I had some things that went wrong, and some the next year, but gradually I'm learning and last year was about right (I got crops and I ate them, not the garden creatures)! This year, I am experimenting with some new things, let's see what happens!
I hope you enjoy your garden, it looks perfect 😍
I think we have an orchard :-D (here its called "Streuobstwiesen") because the part behind our garden i did not photograph but we can use has roughly 10 apple trees with some other trees mixed in and a meadow we never mown. But sooner or later we have to try to cut/trim some of these trees as they are growing too many branches and do not have enough light to prosper... and some of them are lying flat because of storm, but are still alive. It has a wonderful atmosphere <3
I am curious to hear what you will learn about this kind of garden/nature.
Our garden and the whole area (perhaps I should write a post about this someday) was a kitchen garden for a pit foreman roughly 100-120 years ago. The foreman's mansion is beside the garden and around it are apple trees, and old vegetable patches. The downside is the land was used for very long and we still find buried parts of various sheds.
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Love your raised beds! This is something I should do for my gophers. Thanks for sharing your awesome knowledge!
Why are tiny furry animals so cute??? I just researched gophers (we do not have them) and I can imagine that they can destroy a lot of harvest… nevertheless so cute. We have voles, bunnies and hare who think I planted a buffet for them. For the raised beds (and for new trees) we use a kind of chicken wire as base layer so that the animals cannot dig into the beds from the ground.
We do not have the wire in the „normal“ patches and there the voles dig out onions and garlic :-DDD
We had a pet rabbit for a little bit, and that thing was so destructive! She did turn my backyard from a rock hard soil patch where nothing grew, into a fertile spot where i now have grass, so I am grateful for that. But we could not have any plants, unless they where out of reach in pots.
Welcome to our community!
I also hate when people say things like, "just sick 'em in the ground and they'll grow." It's never that simple.
Oh and by the way, slugs hate coffee grounds but love beer. Hehehe, use that to your advantage.
Thank you for the lovely welcome. I got the tip from @crosheille to post about the garden in this community (i mostly write into @needleworkmonday ) I hope too share a bit about or garden journey... and the parties the slugs are having in the garden :-DDD We tried a lot in the last year: collecting them, sand, coffee grind, egg shells, slug fence... but ours are so hungry, they ignore all our efforts. Two things I did not try so far are copper bands and beer traps (the latter is not for me, I cannot kill slugs).
Did you have success with the coffee grind? Is there a trick involved I did not know? I am really curious 🙂
Such voracious slugs! They mostly bother my pepper plants, feeding on their leaves. All I do is put a little pile all around the base of the stem and that seems to be enough. (The slugs here are small.) It also keeps the pill bugs and squirrels away from my beans.
Nice planner. I like using drawing tools with layers. For garden planning it makes it easy to update things as you go. Keep a snapshot photo each time you update, and you'll have a garden journal, so you can look back at your progress of what you have done in the past.
Sometimes seeds won't all come up in the nice perfect arrangement I had planned, so I like to return every week and put new seeds into the empty spots where nothing came up. Might be a bit wasteful, but works for me if in containers where I want lots of something growing in a cluster all summer (carrots, cilantro, anise, daisies).
I only recently discovered painting digitally and even newer was the idea to plan the garden with procreate. No idea why i needed so long to understand how practical several layers are in planning :-D
The garden journal is such a lovely idea... not sure if I am consistent enough, but I will try to add some photos to the notes.
And yes to the seeds. i don't think its wasteful. The book i just bought (you know, I have no clue about gardening, everything I know is from books 🤣) advices to do exactly this. The author tells to fill every spot either with mulch or plants (for my climate she advices to fill empty spots with lettuce, spinach or purslane or clover)
I love those raised beds and I am planning to do the same on this vegetable garden in the coming months.
We have three different kinds of raised beds... all trial and error. We made one from stone, one is a bought wooden one and one is the mound bed. The latter is from this year, so we have no experience how it will behave.
Which variety of raised bed will you built? And for which kind of vegetable... I am a bit curious - so much to learn :-)
I think I am going to construct a raised bed using used hollow blocks as walls and I am planning to plant squash and snow cabbage. And same here, I have so much to learn.
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