Prepping the square foot garden area.

The Christmas snow has melted and I'm getting anxious so I decided to start prepping the garden area.

I removed most of the weeds, got the area relatively level and laid down landscaping fabric to keep weeds from surfacing.  The plan is to put pebbles all around the raised gardens.

Here is what the area looked like just before laying the fabric:



Here is what it looked like after placing the frames and laying the landscaping fabric:



Now, I just need to find somewhere that sells vermiculite and I can add the growing medium.

Winter Planning

We completed construction of the frames for the square foot gardens in October.  They sat dormant through the winter while we made garden plans for the spring.

Through the winter I ordered seed catalogs, downloaded information from our local extension service on which varieties of vegetables grow well in our area, made excel spreadsheets with schedules for plantings, and charted where everything was to be planted in the garden.

Here is what my year-long planting schedule looked like (the two shades of blue depict planting seasons for seeds vs. transplants and the green indicates harvest periods).  The schedule is based on the average last and first frosts for our area.



Here are the planting charts of the four gardens:



After basically deciding on which vegetables and varieties we were going to plant, I scoured the various seed catalogs and websites to find those varieties and price purchases.  Here's what my resulting spreadsheet looked like (I've omitted the names of the various seed companies).:



Some of the plants we've decided to use are experiments.  We have also probably a little ambitious about how much we're packing into the space.  But this year is all about trying it out and learning.  Good, bad and ugly.  You'll see it all here.