When we finally built and planted our garden last year, a friend commented that it was “Uh…the tidiest garden I’ve ever seen.” I think that was her kind way of saying “You’re a little nuts.”
You’ll notice I said “finally” there. That’s because we had bought and moved onto our farm six years before that. For six years, I planned. Researched. Diagrammed. Got caught up in permaculture theory and had to deal with my feelings about fences and raised beds. Planned. Re-diagrammed.
One downside to being an over-thinker is that it often takes a really long time for big projects like this to come to fruition. One upside, though, is that by the time they finally do—they’re often wildly successful. To folks outside of my brain, these “immediate” results seem like alchemy or beginner's luck. They’re not aware of the volumes of prep work I put in before I bought a single seed packet.
It might also take a different type of person, who prefers to jump right into projects and learn as they go, six years to achieve the same results I got on year one. Same time frame, same eventual results. Just different roads to get there. I don't believe one way is better than the other. If it makes you happy to scatter a bunch of seeds in some pots, promptly forget what they are, and see what happens…go for it! Seriously though, I had a friend who did that. It scarred me.
But before I go feeling all proud of myself, I’ll admit that there are real benefits to the “learn as you go” approach (or so I hear). Chief among them, I imagine, is that you’d get tons of hands-on experience with your specific spot, micro-climates, and plants—rather than relying on garden “theory.” You’d also have practice mitigating your own expectations from one year to the next.
I know from the garden at our first rental house in Maine that by year two the soil nutrients were a bit more depleted and “the eaters” had found us. I think maybe you have a grace period for your first season that allows you spend time precisely thinning each seedling instead of battling voles and groundhogs.
Here’s our 2020 garden plan (click to expand and inspect all its excruciating detail, if you dare):
Basic stats:
Six raised vegetable beds, 4 feet x 18 feet each. I chose to group plants by their family and move them each season (the white arrows indicate the direction) to combat disease and replace nutrients. A kind of miniature version of a larger farm that rotates crops through different fields.
Four raised berry beds, 4 feet x 18 feet each. It took a looooong time to build everything and get the vegetable beds filled and planted, so the berry beds weren’t planted yet.
One raised medicinal herb bed, 4 feet x 18 feet. The actual herb spread ended up a bit different than this diagram, but was stuffed to the gills and provided me with loads of dried herbs, tinctures, oils, and salves.
I like a lot of different things in my garden (I’ve ordered 120 different varieties for this year!). Not only does this please my senses, it also ensures at least some success with every type of food I’m growing. Even if a particular type of carrot doesn’t sprout or grow well, I still have three other types to rely on. It also helps with pest control to avoid enormous swaths of monoculture.
To keep things, well, “tidy,” I organized each bed into 12 sections using string. Square foot gardening is a method that spoke to me early in my learning process (so precise! so productive!), so even though I have more room now, I still use those ideas for plant spacing and layout.
Major upgrades / to do’s for this season include:
Fill and plant the four berry beds. All my beds get a mix of 50% soil from a local landscaper (combo of topsoil and composted cow manure) and 50% of our own composted horse manure. Since the soil settles throughout the season and nutrients have been pulled out by the crops, I’ll also add a hefty amount of composted horse manure to all the veggie beds this year before planting.
Finish / fix holes in the weed fabric that covers the ground around the beds, and possibly cover with a layer of some other material (sand? wood chips?).
Pretty decent harvest from the second week of October.
Finish assembling the perimeter electric fence. Remember that first season “grace period” from the eaters? I fully expect them to descend this year, and I’ll be ready for them. I have hardware cloth tacked to the bottom of all the beds to deter voles. I hope I won’t have to contend with too many perimeter diggers, but am prepared to dig a trench and run vertical hardware cloth underground if I need to.
Assemble the rain barrel irrigation system. This was another thing that I didn’t get to let year, but I managed to limp along with a far-reaching sprinkler system. More frequent and deeper watering with soil-level drip lines should theoretically result in even more bounty!
Build some cold frames. 2020 was a mild fall, so we actually had greens and alliums well into October (!) with no protection. But I want to extend that salad season even longer.
Notes and changes from last season include:
Rearrange my string guides to position my “rows” vertically in 4-foot segments instead of horizontally as 6-foot. Not only will this allow for more variety (teehee!), but I’ll also be able to keep the tallest plants and earliest successions on the North ends of the beds. Last year, long rows of bigger seedlings like broccoli shaded out some of their smaller neighbors.
Speaking of seedlings, I’m going to start my own this year! Although I did direct seed a ton of varieties last year, I also bought a good amount of locally-grown seedlings. This helped me “catch up” with some of the things I didn’t get in the ground early enough. Although I always like to leave a few spaces in the garden to accommodate last-minute additions from attractive farmers’-market seedlings, I’m going to be starting the majority myself.
Give the heavy feeders more space. The cucurbitaceae (cucumbers, melons), solanaceae (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers), and graminaea (corn, popcorn) were a bit of a clusterfuck last year. We all loved the squash tunnel, but the plants weren’t very cooperative in only sticking to that structure. This year I’ll give the solanaceae an entire bed to themselves. Still figuring out how to work that into the rotation…
Change the corn plan. So far, I haven’t had much success with growing corn. I’m sure it would do better if started earlier and given more water, but midcoast Maine is also very prone to high winds. Every time I’ve tried corn, it's been knocked down.
This year I’ll still plant some, but will actually do so in a small plot outside the fenced garden area. I’m hoping to draw some deer close to my tree stand (a.k.a. kids’ tree house), but am telling myself that if the wind knocks it down again I won’t feel as deflated. There’s a local farm just nine minutes from us that grows incredible corn, so this may just be one of those things that I leave to someone else.
Once I have my diagram updated with this year’s layout and varieties, I’ll share it here. Even though I’m excited for sunny days filled with muddy children munching just-picked carrots, I’m also really enjoying the off-season.
I was going to say “relaxing pace” there, but that’s not quite accurate. Alongside my full-time job as a marketer, I’m also pursuing my Masters degree in Herbal Medicine and planning the launch of our farm’s subscription service. So I haven’t exactly slowed down. But, I do appreciate that I’m not currently fending off the calls of plants that need tending or being buried by avalanches of produce. I’m actually looking forward to being buried by more snow first.
