I hate waking up. Whenever I see a television commercial where some fresh faced woman sits up in bed at 6 a.m. grinning and stretching like the very idea of jumping out of bed to meet the glorious day is the best part of her life, I want to kill her. I understand she'll be rewarded with a) a glass of orange juice b) a cup of Folgers or c) the delight of knowing her tampon didn't leak all night but still .... none of those things warrants a lobotomy grin.
When I used to fight traffic and drive 2 hours into work every morning, waking up meant slumping in the general direction of the floor, angrily putting my feet down and swearing. Often the f word. Out loud. I'd then look back at the warm, dark bed with tears in my eyes and promise I'd jump right back in the very second I got home. No bathing, no eating, just sleeping.
Now that I make my own schedule, nothing has changed. It seems no matter what time I get out of bed or what lies ahead of me ... I'm angry about it. It doesn't last long, but for those first few minutes upon waking ... you don't want to annoy me. And by "annoy" I mean exist.
But yesterday was different. Yesterday I woke up knowing I was going to organize and plant my vegetable garden. And I was a grinning, lobotomized idiot the second I woke up. Truth is, whenever I have a huge project ahead of me I'm like the orange juice commercial girl in the morning. (unless you count months 2 and 3 of building the chicken coop)
Planting my garden was made infinitely easier by using a tool I found online at Mother Earth News.
What I found there was a Vegetable Garden Planner. And it's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen or used. Next to hair conditioner. Or as we said when I was 5, Cream Rinse.
The garden planner allows you to pick where you live in the world and the program does the rest from there. It's basically graph paper that you can configure to be the size of your garden. The top of the program has a huge list of vegetables to drag and drop wherever you want them in your garden. It even automatically shows you how much space that plant will take up and how many you can plant in your specific space, and when to plant them!
The program is free for 30 days, then it's a cost of $25. Worth every penny.
My Front Yard Vegetable Garden Plans
I've chosen to plant using a lesser known planting method called Square Foot Gardening. Instead of planting your crops in rows, you do everything in a variety of one square foot plots. How much you put in each square depends on how big the plant is. The Mother Earth News Garden Planner allows you to choose whether you want to use square foot gardening. All you do is click on the vegetable you want up at the top of the page, drag it down to your space and the program automatically tells you how many of those particular vegetables can be planted into that square foot. The bigger the vegetable the less you can put in the square foot.
For instance you can plant one tomato, 9 beets or 4 turnips in one square foot.
Using the square foot method of gardening lets you harvest a lot more than the standard row planting. You can really smash a lot of plants into a very limited space. So if you want a garden but only have a 4' x 4' area, don't be discouraged. You can get a huge amount out of that little space.
And that's just the first planting! Many of the cool weather plants listed can be succession planted or planted again in mid summer for a fall harvest. If you're in Southern Ontario and you'd like to start planting right now. Well damnit, you can.
People seem to think you can't start planting anything until it's warm out, but there are many things that can be planted out even when frost is still likely.
These cool weather crops include peas, carrots, lettuces, Kale, Beets, Asparagus, Onions, Radishes, Parsnips, Spinach, Kale and Swiss Chard. These are all planted and sprouting in my front yard vegetable garden right now. Many of them will be planted again later in the summer, doubling my crop size for those particular plants.
The more tender plants like tomatoes, squash etc. will wait until a later date to make their garden debut.
Next week I'll reveal my complete front yard vegetable garden makeover. For now. It's back to bed. You know ... the vegetable bed.
Karen
Karen, your first paragraph almost gave me an asthma attack trying not to laugh out loud bc my fella's asleep in the next room...
Just sayin. :)
Karen
Apologies. :) ~ karen
Sherry
Okay!!!! that is helpful and encouraging!
Thank you
Sherry
Okay I have a question... I have a few patches of ground in the front of my house (in winnipeg) south facing and I want to plant tomatoes and peppers _ I would love asparagus, onions, lettuce, not alot, but... I have evergreen trees and the last tomatoes I planted ( first two years were fantastic and abundant) have rotted before they ripened... I tried all the 'product' to save them, but I want to know what to do to make the soil garden friendly without cutting down all my trees. the square foot garden sounds perfect for the front of my house and I would love to try it.
Karen
Sherry - It's hard to say how to deal with your problem without actually seeing it, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that you can't plant the same vegetables in the same spot for more than 2 years. Most vegetables are prone to some sort of disease and growing them in the same spot encourages that. Also, different plants like different types of nutrients and *leave* different types of nutrients, so you always need to rotate your plantings. So ... move your tomatoes. Also, you can amend your soil with things like peat moss and compost. Compost is the best thing you can do for your garden soil. You can either make your own, find a farmer who has some to give away or buy it by the bag (like you would potting soil) at a garden centre. Just throw the bag on your garden and dig it into the top 6 or so inches. You can also "top dress" with compost, just mulching around the plant with a few inches of compost. That's it for now. Good luck! ~ karen
angie
Sorry, I forgot to mention that smartgardener.com also uses a square foot planting model and that it has a plant calculator. You tell the program how many people you want to feed from your garden, and it tells you how many plants of each variety you need to plant, so that you actually have enough food for your family.
angie
Hi, I just wanted to let you know, http://www.smartgardener.com is free and it does the exact same thing. It takes into account your zip code, which way is North in your garden, and the tallness and harvest dates, and types of your plants and then it will lay them out for you in their ideal locations. You can tweak the layout however you want, or go rogue and make your own plans. After setting up your plots, you tell it if you're using containers or beds in the ground, or any combination of the two, then you'll get a weekly reminder in your "garden journal" of what you're suppose to be doing that week. Soil prep, start seeds indoors, transplant squash, sow spinach, etc. I think it's pretty awesome....and free, did I mention that it's free?
Charlotte | Living Well on the Cheap
How exciting! I started my very first veggie garden this year, a 4x4 SFG that is coming along swimmingly. I planted three months ago and can you believe it was already too late for spinach? My seeds sprouted but never made it to edible status. I'm in south Louisiana, though, so obviously our climates differ in some significant ways.
Jordan
I love reading your blog, and am especially excited that you can plant kale AND kale.
Rose :: Fine Craft Guild .com
Fun to realize you're not a morning person either ha ha... Thank you for sharing the veggy planner. I'll look into that. Talkinhg about how much space gives you what: did you see this article re. vertical gardening ( http://www.finecraftguild.com/vertical-gardening/ ).... ha ha... it may skew the program.... What do you think of it?
Gayla T
Mother Earth News gone digital! How times have changed. It looks like a wonderful program. Once all this comes to fruitation, maybe you can do a rutabaga cooking segment. I ate them in Ireland and loved them but trying to work with them once I got back was another story. It takes a chain saw to peel and cut them up. Then I boiled it with a little butter and it was ok but not the flavor I remembered. In the old hen/new tricks department, I just learned about determinate and indeterminate tomato plants. It sure would have saved me a lot of grief when my plants stopped producing. Nothing, including hand pollination, would get them going again. Duh!!! I'm almost as excited about your garden as I am about mine. You are doing great. Me,not so great.
Karen
Gayla - Rutabaga can be tough and icky if they're left in the ground too long. Cut it in half, peel it, dice it, boil it in salted water. Add a shitload of butter and either some brown sugar or maple syrup. ~ karen!
kelliblue
Wow...that's what I call a big a** garden! Didn't look like you had that much space from the pictures you posted but hey...you go you garden girl!
Like you, a morning person I ain't. Sometimes I wonder if I'm adopted: I'm a night owl (everyone else in my fam are morning larks); I got the big German bones (everyone else - skinny minnies); I got brown hair (everyone else - blondeish). Might have to have a chat with Mom.
What? no rhubarb or kohlrabi on that list?
Karen
Kelliblue - The rhubarb is already growing. Been there for years, hidden in a different area of the garden. ~ karen!
Amber
This is awesome, thanks for the tip on the software. Your garden is about the size of our dining room, and that is a lot of food. It's making me rethink whether I really want a vegetable garden that large! Maybe it would behoove me not to be as efficient as you! We didn't get on it soon enough this year (we're in NC, where asparagus is already done and we're starting to get onions and strawberries already). You're not allowed to do front yard vegetables in our city (unfortunate, because we have a sunny hill that's a pain in the ass to mow) but the side yard and a square plot between the garage and deck are possibilities for next year. I'll be sure to bookmark this for later.
Judith
Read this post this morning, made a mental note to give the garden planner a looksie when the day wound down, and went about my business. Now I'm sitting here playing with the trial and I'm the orange juice commercial girl too! Shaking my head and smiling at the computer - who the hell does that in real life? Me with my new favorite toy, that's who. Thanks for the tip!
Sam
Thanks for the resource--I'm doing a seminar on urban veg gardening in a couple of weeks and I'll pass it on if the sizes etc work for Winterpeg :). I am very, very, very jealous though... My stupidly huge project (bread oven) got cut short by an emergency belly surgery--the same damn weekend I was clearing the spot for it... So now I'm stuck with the subsequent "you can't do anything or lift anything for six weeks". Stupid dead intestine! Better than not being here, but still sucks being laid up for spring (or ever!). So now I'm gonna live vicariously through your project for a couple more weeks :). I guess it will give me time to modify the plans I found on paper, instead of on the fly... But where's the fun in that? I'll send 'em when they make sence... Kinda like "inventing" your chicken coop?
Karen
LOL. Well good luck with your belly. If we combined my chicken coop and your bread oven we'd have a REALLY good sandwich. ~ karen
Erin
It's so great to hear everyone's experience with square foot gardening. SFG is also a good gardening system if you are new to gardening and just need to learn what different veggies look like during different stages. It is truly amazing the amount of food that can be produced in a small area.
Once we went rural, we looked to other methods - actually having a wider spacing and allowing more root development. (Because, I am basically lazy and don't want to spend a lot of time watering.) I was shocked at the size of our "spaced out" broccoli heads and tomato plants.
Fresh veg however you grow it is the best. Karen your plan looks great and I know you'll enjoy every bite! I'm off to pot up tomato seedlings now...
Carol Ann
I am in awe.
Kate S.
I started using the Mother Earth News planner last year and LOVE it. Just the ability to move things all over the page without erasing and making a big mess is fabulous.
So excited to see your garden! I think you should do a reader-submission post and we can all send you pictures of our gardens, too.
Evalyn
You plan to get through the summer on 20 cucumbers? What are you punishing yourself for?
Evalyn
Seriously, you grow rutabegas? I love rutabegas but my area has wireworm so bad I don't even try. Same with radishes and turnips. My root vegetable life is reduced to beets and carrots.
My mornings are much like yours, I do much better if there's a task in place.
Jacqueline
Cream rinse. Heh.
The boy has big plans for a garden this year, so far we've bought enough seed for a couple of acres. He has an 10 x 8 plot. I'll show him this online planner. His head will explode.
Thanks Karen! (for the gardening tips, not the head explosion)
Emily
My family called it Cream Rinse, too!!! I haven't heard that in years. It's the little things that excite me these days.