Meanwhile out in the garden

I wrote previously about our first attempt at a winter garden.  Our brassica bed with kale, romanesco, and broccoli was what one might call less than stellar.  Typically one hopes for heads of broccoli and romanesco.  We harvested florets.  The kale was fine, but we didn't get a huge amount.  In all fairness though, we put it in really late and barely paid it any mind.


Our other bed was a mix of carrots, lettuces, arugula, parsley, cilantro, green onions, spinach, and Swiss chard.  We had a decent harvest, with ample lettuces, arugula, and cilantro.  In preparation for our spring planting, we made our last harvest so we can get the bed ready for tomatoes and peppers.  We had very little in the way of carrots and pretty low expectations at this point, so I was pleasantly surprised to harvest this:

Most of them were small, but we ended up with about a pound of fresh crisp, sweet yumminess.  And to think I thought the carrots were a total bust.

In addition we had a large bowl packed with lettuce and a huge amount of cilantro.  The lettuce we used right away and I saw a TV chef freeze fresh parsley so I'll give our cilantro the cold shoulder and see how that works out!

Our Garden Plan

I started plotting out the garden beds with pen and paper, then tried a spreadsheet and while each worked just fine, I was thrilled to come upon this garden planning software.  It is super easy to learn, filled with helpful information, and customizable to your particular climate.  It even has good information about companion planting and crop rotation.  I measured out our front and back yards, plugged the data into the software and went to town.  Looking at our yard in this way actually helped us to identify more areas we could use for our edible garden.

This is the plan for our front yard:

This is the back yard:

The program also provides really helpful information about when to start indoors/outdoors and has room for personal notes.

 

I know the text of these images is likely to small to read, but hopefully you get the idea. We are growing the basics, tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, and trying a few more uncommon items like rutabaga and kohlrabi.

We measure our growing area in feet rather than acres, and have been inspired by the idea of square foot gardening.  I don't think we fall under the umbrella of a true square foot gardener, but we are growing most of our plants more tightly spaced than traditional recommendations.  We will know is several months how this pans out!