how does your garden grow?
Pardon me while I think out loud.
Thanks to Ms. sugar shock, I'm completely hooked on the idea of Square Foot Gardening. It's not that we don't have the room in our yard for a traditional garden... it's that we only get full sun on one side of the house, and naturally, that's the least accessible part of the yard, if you were planning a traditional tilled-and-planted-in-rows garden. I think that if I transplant the few flowers I have over there - hostas, which will thrive just as well in shady parts of the yard - I'll be able to plant a garden with decent yield in just the space that those few plants take up now.
The box won't be 4' x 4' - it'll be more like 2' x 10' - but I think that will be manageable. I can easily reach across 2' to tend to the plants in the back.
I will be very interested to see how my yields are. It won't take much to be an improvement over last year's garden, but I have years of traditional gardening behind me... some of them very impressive, too, like the year my then-husband and I had a literal forest of 6-foot-tall tomato plants.
Anyway, so now the fun part: deciding what to plant. Tomatoes are a given. I was planning on a lot of squashes of various kinds, but those are sprawling plants - maybe best not in the box, but they grew fine for me last year in the shady part of the yard. I can't eat peppers, but Adam enjoys them, so maybe some of those. Scallions, for sure. Lettuces, definitely. Oh, and cucumbers - lots of cucumbers of the pickling variety. I'm not sure what else.
Anyone else dreaming of digging in the dirt during these freezing-cold January days?
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Speaking of which, I have grown sugar pumpkins (the 3-5 lb variety) in my SFG for 2 years in a row now. If you're planning on doing the trellis along the back of the garden, you can weave the squash vine up into the trellis. And even though the pumpkins got pretty large, they never pulled the vine down, or caused any breakage. It was actually kind of fun to see them hanging in the air (here's a pic from 05: http://www.poethecat.com/pics/garden/2005/pumpkinlatejuly.jpg). Plus, that way they don't get that flat spot on one side!
The only drawback si that they do take up a lot of the trellis with their large leaves. The SFG book recommends growing pumpkins in a 4'x1' box with a big trellis, but both years I grew mine using just two of the back 4 squares that use the trellis. Then, in the other 2, I planted sugar snap peas. Peas are an early spring crop, so by the time the pumpkin had grown up one side of the trellis and was coming around to go down the other, the peas had all been harvested and the trellis was free.
Another suggestion is to make sure to include flowers in your boxes, because you'll attract more bees, and squash and pickles need the pollination that bees provide.
Also, lettuce-wise, Seeds of Change's Val D'Orge butter lettuce is the tastiest lettuce I've ever eaten. We finished it faster that it'd grow, so I ended up doing some succession planting so it would keep coming up for as long as possible.
yeah...as you can probably tell, I'm a big geek when it comes to my garden. heh..
We have quite a large garden, and although daunted by it, I am desperate to start getting out there and digging, but I am SO cold!!!
I really want to grow my own veg, and once we tidy up our back garden a bit, I think I might plan some small raised beds just to start us off... start small and grow! :)
Good luck with your SFG, it sounds like a great idea :)
The pumpkins were so cute! :) See, I had no idea you could even grow pumpkins up a trellis - granted, these are small ones, but I still assumed they'd snap off the vines. I'd like to try spaghetti squash; there's small varieties out there, but I'm still thinking they're large enough to break the vines. Hmm. I'll be giving it all more thought, like I said.
Sometimes it's tough living in the north. I want to go out and build a box already, haha.