2012 Master Plan: The Swingset Quadrant

As the garden planning went on, we moved our operations into the dining room, where we had much more room to spread out:

This photo makes this process look neat and orderly, but behind the table on a bench is a much messier stack of catalogues, reference books, and scraps of graphs paper and lists that you can't see here.

Anyway, the next quadrant is the one closest to the kids' swingset. It is far from the house and to the left when looking out the kitchen door. As described in earlier posts, this quadrant has asparagus in the long bed to the left, and has grapes and herbs in the long bed across the back (or top, in this view):

The new areas are the annual vegetables. Starting at the bed toward the front (bottom), are 52 Roma tomatoes: Monica and Bellstar. These plants are bush varieties, so they take up more room than the vines that we will trellis. They will also ripen at more or less the same time, which is useful for making large amounts of sauce to can, sun dried tomatoes to store, etc. This is our bed for processing for the winter, which is why we are planning for soooooo many tomato plants. Since we are planting so many, we will start these from seed ordered from Johnny's Selected Seeds later this spring.

In the bed to the right we have cabbage and broccoli (32 of each). The cabbage will be in the section below the path, and the broccoli will be in the section above. Later in the summer when these are long gone, lettuces, carrots, and other fall/winter salad stuff will go in this spot. This area is where the seeds I started last weekend will eventually set out. By the way, here's how those seedlings look today:

Finally, the center "C" has the garlic that we planted last fall and will be set out with leeks and onions in the rest of it (about 120 of each). I started 72 cells of Copra seed, which is a yellow onion variety that is supposed to be good for hard storage. The rest of the onion area will be done with sets of Red Zeppelin, which is also supposed to store well for the winter. We have had absolutely terrible luck with onions in the past, so we are experimenting with the combination of seeds and sets to see which does better.

As you can see by the large amounts of everything that we are planting, we are really trying to work out a garden that feeds us year round. We are hoping that a combination of choosing varieties that keep well, freezing and canning others, and making some into soups and sauces that we can keep will help us have our own vegetables far into next winter.