Garden Planning for Mom {and the Little Ones, Too!}

January is that cozy time of gardening when all the seed catalogs come pouring in, and you get to dream and plant your perfect garden all in your head, full of new and exciting varieties!

And then you get to look at the seeds you already have, the space you have, the money you have (those packets of exotic little cultivars add up fast!), and modify your lists.

And THEN you get to go about penciling and sketching in order to figure out how you want it to all come together. It inevitably changes as some seedlings fail or others thrive or you just succumb to whimsy. But I have to say that I really love the initial planning stage for all that I might deviate down the road!

Here is my cozy little corner of the couch where I've been doing my planning.

I didn't get a shot of it when it was literally plastered in seed catalogs as I navigated the mind boggling task of deciding just what to order from where! But you can see my first arrival of seeds from Renee's Garden peeking from the box. Such pretty little packages! I used quart sized ziplock to sort the seeds in the box by category (Winter Sowing, Start Indoors, Direct Sow Early, and Direct Sow Late).

I tried keeping my plans in a binder last year, and I just am not a good manager of loose-leaf paper. I've had good luck with keeping a little notebook for household matters in recent months, so I decided to move my garden planning notes to a composition notebook. I taped my plan into the front with my beds lettered off. I really need to update this plan to be more accurate, but for the time being, I just have lots of things scribbled out and others penciled in.

I have a page for each bed marked off with tabs, and I use my sticky notes (the small kind cut in half) for my square feet. I find planning for square foot gardening, even if I modify a bit, is the simplest and gives me a good idea of how much I can squeeze into a bed comfortably! I can move my squares around, and I can add stickies for successive plantings on top of the squares there so I am keeping an ongoing record.

The green tabs are for a calendar, plotting section for quick notes about what we have done when, a page per month, and a section for brainstorming and notes about the potager as well as a third section for notes and ideas for general landscaping around the property. I kept my binder for saving print outs from web articles I want to keep handy.

I was pretty absorbed in my planning for a few days, and my boys were constantly telling me how they wanted to plan THEIR gardens, too. I put them off for a while, but when I realized just how long I'd put them off and feared their losing interest, I quick came up with a plan.

Since we use our modified version of Square Foot Gardening after using it successfully in our little city garden at our former home. We decided that it would be the easiest method for the boys to use, so we have planned that they will each get their own little 4x4 beds to plant this Spring. I have two enthusiastic non-readers, and so I came up with the following plan.

After realizing how pricey stickers were and how it would mean waiting even longer for them to arrive, I had the idea to cut up last year's catalog from John Scheeper's Kitchen Garden Seeds, full of dainty watercolor and pen and ink illustrations of the plants featured. I made a quick table in Word with 2x2 inch squares representing square feet in their 4x4 inch beds. I hastily glued down my cutouts and scribbled the names of the plants, scanned, and printed the sheets so they could cut out the plants they want and place them on their own plots.

I printed blank tables on cardstock, and the boys went to it, cutting and arranging.

I examined each of them prior to gluing, helped them make judicious choices about placement concerning the size of the plants and the need for trellising.

It was a fun project, and the prep work did not take so much time. They didn't seem to mind the few veggies that were oriented upside down, defying gravity!

 I put their plans in plastic sleeves in a binder, and we will see if I get them interesting in keeping further notes about their gardening choices this Spring. We need to develop these habits early so they aren't like their mother, struggling to recall things she was sure wouldn't forget last year!

Oh Bother.

Gardening really is involved. When you are juggling the life of a young family with gardening, well, I haven't figured out how one is able to effectively blog about it, too.

However, if I want to embrace this whole gardening thing, and I do, I need to get better at record keeping. And while I have simplified my notebook this week so that I can hopefully improve in preserving the nitty-gritty, it occurred to me that even without writing stuff down, I did take copious amounts of pictures, which are date tagged, so going through that should give me a good idea of when I did what last go around.

And truly, is there an easier medium for organizing pictures while making notes on them? I figure I might as well use my blog as a tool.

So I will. And it will be messy. Believe me, this post is a picture heavy MESS. But it is a tool. And if it means I can share some of our adventure with friends and family in the process, all the better!

Now, I did blog about the gardening book, Elements of Garden Design. And I did love it, and it really helped. I can't recall exactly how I applied it to this project at this point. Truly, my husband and I were just talking about how completely shocked we are when we have stumbled across pictures from our garden last year! "Whoa! Did we really do all that?" Because right now, its a bunch of wood chips and cinder-block with some swiss chard and a row of brown asparagus waiting to be cut down.

This time last year, there was nothing. Well, there was a big, leaning tree very much in the way of our plans. And while we share the neurotic fear of westerners that every time we cut down a tree we are somehow complicit in the mass exploitation of the rain forests in South America, we were forced to admit that when it came down, it was an improvement beyond the fact that it allowed our garden.

Then, at the end of February, we had little else except some posts at ten foot intervals that my husband lovingly called the Appian Way. We're pretty sure the neighbors were terrified. I don't have a good picture, but I did take some pictures of some of my early winter sowing experiments a week or so later, and you can see the eery posts in the background.

 As the month of March wore on, my husband was a wonder and brought our vision to life in spite of his host of "helpers."

Meanwhile, I planted seeds in milk jugs and didn't write a single thing down on paper.

We got a bunch of woodchips from the tree that came down, but I think it must have been in this time that I located our source for garden soil and free (!) woodchips.

I'm pretty sure we spent the entire month of April moving woodchips.

Aaaand that brings us up to the point where I planted strawberries.