I decided to take a chance on the garden today. In the end, I think the risk will be pretty light. Today I planted about 85% of the garden. What made me decide to take the chance? With a 10-day forecast like looks like this? How could I not take advantage and get the garden going.
A great forecast to start off the month of May
(I couldn’t get the rest of the 10 days in the screen capture, but the remaining 3 days currently look just as warm.)
In the end, I managed to plant all but tomatoes, sweet potatoes and a basil plant. The only reason I skipped those three was that I don’t have any sweet potato or basil plants yet and I still need to get some landscape fabric to put down before planting the tomatoes.
Armed with garden tools, seeds and the following planting plan I headed to the garden this morning. Here is my original plan as designed back in March.
Original 2015 Planting Plan
As many of you also know, plans have a way of falling apart as soon as they hit reality. Apparently, I do not have the best spacial mental map of the vegetable plants and how much space they require. I would think that after all these years in this garden, I would have it down by now and could work from memory, but guess not. Working with the original plan and going from bed to bed, I was able to re-work and re-orient the plan to the following design. We’ll see how well it works as the plants grow.
Updated Planting Plan for 2015
Let’s get to planting this garden! First up green beans. This year I am actually planting both pole beans and bush beans. I’ve got big plans for canning green beans this summer and having a harvest of both kinds should well… I guess give me more green beans.
Ring of green bean seeds
In addition to the new plants, I am also getting an second planting of some of the cool weather vegetables. Another round of spinach, lettuce and radish.
Shaking out some spinach seeds
Time to get some of these plants out of the basement and into the garden. First up to escape the artificial light is the Brussels sprouts.
Basement Brussels Sprouts get liberated
After planting Brussels sprouts, Sunflowers, Yellow Squash, Zucchini, Bush Green Beans, Pole Green Beans, Cucumbers, Carrots, Lettuce, Radish and Spinach… I was tired. Oh wait, that wasn’t where I was going, after getting all those planted, the garden is about ready to explode with vegetables.
End result
End result from a different angle
Now that all the new seeds are in the ground, I also took the time to check in on the other plants that already blazed the 2015 garden trail.
Radish with some lettuce and spinach in the background
Peas are now starting to climb
This years onion forest
In the hopes to improve the pollinators in the neighborhood, I got this swanky Mason Bee house for Christmas. I placed it right back by the vegetable garden. If all goes well, I’ll hope to report later this summer of the new tenets.
An extra band to keep the house secure to the tree
And finally, I also updated the 2015 Planting Calendar.
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