Like I mentioned last week, we got all of our spring/summer plantings done in our garden this month. Before the sun starts beating down and our plants start growing out of control, I thought it might be nice to do a time capsule of what our garden looks like right now. It’ll (hopefully) be looking completely different in a month!
Our garden is big enough that it’s pretty hard to capture it all in the lens of one shot. So I did what I do and took to Illustrator to draw you guys up a little bird’s-eye view of the whole plot.
Click to see a larger version
The front section of the garden (the one with the raised beds on the left, starting with the strawberries, and the tomatoes on the right) is a new addition this year. Previously, the garden ended along the garlic/melons line, but we extended it because it was pretty much unused space, and we can always plant more tomatoes!
Eventually, we’d love to transition the vast majority of the garden into raised beds, not only do we like the look of them, but we also like the maintenance—with a little bit of mulch to help retain moisture, they are so easy to take care of. But making enough nice raised beds for a 5000 square foot garden isn’t a cheap undertaking, just like with the fence, we’ll be adding some a few beds each year to help spread out the cost.
But for now, the entire right side of the garden is row crops. Which fits a ton, but makes weed control a bit tricky. We’re doing a lot of pulling, but it’s a losing battle. Ha! We’re learning a lot this year, and already have lots of plans in the works to make it easier next year. Thankfully, even though we have weeds, our veggie plants seem to still seem to be thriving.
Well, except for the carrots. They’ve pretty much just succumbed to the invaders. Come fall, we’ll plant another batch of carrots, and this time, we’ll do some serious mulching (and maybe even move them to one of the raised beds that are emptied from summer crops).
Like I said, this is just our summer garden. A lot of these will come out mid-to-late summer (like the onions, garlic and potatoes) and we’ll be swapping another batch of cooler weather crops—Brussels sprouts, cabbage, etc. We’re fortunate enough here to have a warm enough climate that we can usually get in two cooler weather growing seasons (from March-May and then again from September-Novemberish) and one nice, long summer growing season.
We have a lot of plants that are doing great, but probably our most used garden space so far this season has been our cold frame! We’ve been using this little 8′ x 4′ box of greens almost everyday for the past few months. It’s getting warm enough that things are starting to bolt—the end of green season is approaching—and I’ll be really sad when I can’t get my daily salad from the cold frame.
We’ll be back in the middle of the summer with more pictures—hopefully of big, healthy plants (without too many weeds).
What all did you plant in your garden this year?
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