Port Potager

The plan for the final quadrant isn’t very interesting this year: This entire section will be left fallow. That’s not really about crop rotation so much as it is about making repairs to many of the raised beds in this section of the garden. These were built back in 2011, and after seven years of service, parts are rotting or have warped and come apart where they were screwed together. For example: To make fixing them easier, we aren’t planting anything here and instead will be able to move all the dirt we need to get at the joints to patch them up.  Once that’s taken care of (probably in June, after all the planting is complete), we’ll sow cover crop of clover to add nitrogen and generally keep the beds looking nicer for the rest of the season. Next year we’ll choose a different quadrant to repair, thus working our way around the garden until it’s all back in fighting form.

All of the blizzarding and emotional turmoil of the past week has interrupted my mini-series of posts about the garden's master plan for the coming season. Let's wrap this up, shall we? Our last quadrant: Across the top are our canning tomatoes: Paisano and Amish Paste. To the right is a long block of corn, which we have expanded a bit since we finally had success with it last summer. At the very bottom right corner is our block of okra. The okra is next to the bed of sweet potatoes at the bottom, which should work to give those long vines a little extra space to curl around the tall okra stalks. Those crops should make good neighbors. Also in the bottom row are two zucchini plants (which will be plenty!) and a square of eggplant. Hopefully the eggplant will get enough sun in that spot as the summer wears on. By fall there's some shade there because it's near the house, but by fall we're usually a little tired of eggplant anyway. To the left the...

As I write this, a gentle, fluffy snowfall is blanketing the garden. It looks in life rather like the white planning page: This is the workshop quadrant for 2015. Across the top are more grapes and herbs — perennials that live there permanently. The long row on the right side is, as always, filled with annual herbs (cilantro and dill) and spring greens. This length of planting space has plenty of sun in early spring before a nearby maple leafs out in May. It makes it a good place for leafy items, especially things like lettuces that enjoy the shade to keep them from bolting as temperatures rise. Since these are the only things that do well in the shade, we don't have much crop rotation going on: we just switch the herbs with the greens each year and amend with compost. We have decided on a four-block succession planting for the herbs this year, with plantings every six weeks. Hopefully this will provide cilantro and dill during the summer when we most need it for salsa and...

As I mentioned in my last post, in the fall of 2015 we plan to try a much larger greenhouse space for tunneling over our winter veggies. That large tunnel will be tall enough to walk into, and will arc from the northern edge of the bottom row of the swing set quadrant (in the northeast) all the way over to the southern edge of the top row of the patio quadrant  (which lies directly to the south of the swing set quadrant, separated by a brick path). The greenhouse will have an entryway (maybe even a lightweight, plastic-covered door, if we get fancy) at the center intersection of all the garden beds. Take a look at the big plan and see if you can visualize it: To make this worthwhile, we had to plan ahead to make sure that those two long beds will hold only cool-weather crops. So along the bottom row of the driveway bed, we have a pea trellis, carrots, and leeks: The pea trellis is to the north so that it won't shade the young carrots and leeks as they grow throug...

January snow and ice (or, in this year's case, rain) mean that we're in the short lull between garden seasons. There's still a bit left to harvest from the tunnels through the winter, but during the very shortest days of the year nothing is actually growing. In just a few days we'll be starting leek and onion seedlings indoors, but just now the only gardens that are growing are on paper: This year we've streamlined our plans onto just one big sheet instead of four normal ones. We ran out of graph paper (thanks, Newburyport math and science program!), so Kirk just made a measured drawing. We're pretty well-trained to see the garden as a giant grid for square foot gardening at this point, so this worked out fine. To the right of the plot is the complete list of everything we plant, which gives you a sense of just how big the garden is overall.  By far, the easiest quadrant to plan is the patio section. It's the smallest because it doesn't h...

Another snow day here. Well, to be more precise, we had just a couple of inches here, but further south they had a blizzard, which was enough to get me a snow day. A snow day all to myself while Newburyport kids went to school: ahhh. As always, a snowy day is a lovely time to dream about spring and the coming year's garden. Here is the plan for the final quadrant for 2014: To the left, you can see the mirror image of our pole bean arbor that will span the center path . On this side we have the remaining bed filled with butternut squash instead of pumpkins, though. In the top part of the lefthand row is the corn block. In previous years we have devoted an entire "C" to sweet corn, but have not had a level of success worth dedicating that much space to it. This year we are trying a different variety, but on a smaller scale. If we don't get some nice ears of corn this year, we may give up on growing grain in the garden at all. Along the top row is an...

After a week of March-like temperatures, we are in the midst of a surprise snow storm that (so far) has dropped three or four inches of fluffy wet snow on us this afternoon. While it was warm, I had been thinking about these plans and looking out at the dirt, feeling ready to dig and plant … which of course it's far too early for. So back to water, and back to looking at drawings and snow instead of soil. The patio garden gets easier to fill every year, because the strawberry bed expands every year (until it fills that whole row on the left side, anyway). The bottom row is where our roses, rhubarb, and lavender are, so there is much less planting space here. Across the top and part of the right side are 20 staked tomato plants. These are our salsa and eating tomatoes: heirloom varieties of Rose, Moskvich, and Ukrainian Yellow. Along the top there is also a pea trellis, and sandwiched in between the trellis and the tomatoes will be a double row of carrots. The carrots ...

As I mentioned in an earlier post , we worked really hard in our planning to make sure that next year's winter garden functioned better than this year's. In addition to plotting it out all in one general area, we also pushed the planting dates for most of it up to July 1.  The reason? Well, this season I didn't get to sow many of our fall veggies until July 15th or even August 1st because (in many cases) I had to wait for spots to open up after I could pull out spent plants. Turns out that time frame is just a bit too late for things to get up to size before we lose daylight in mid-autumn. It's not so much the cold as the number of daylight hours you get that affects your plant growth. If you can get things fairly mature before October, you are basically just storing living (but nearly dormant) food in your garden instead of storing dying food in your fridge. (For more on this, see expert winter gardener Eliot Coleman's excellent book,   The Four Season H...

Break out the graph paper! It's that time of year again: With all of the crazy weather we had at the end of our holiday vacation, we didn't get to our garden planning as close to the turn of the new year as we had hoped. But this past weekend we banged out the location of everything we plan to plant in 2014, and in the coming days we will add all the seed starting and planting dates to iCal to help us keep on schedule. We'll also come up with a master list of seeds and plants that we need to order (something we should get to ASAP, because our first seed starting this year is the all-time early date of January 18!). This year we changed our process a bit to (hopefully) ensure a better crop of fall and winter veggies. In the past, we saved those for last in our plans — and this would seem to make sense, since these items are typically the last things planted in July or August. But what has happened in practice is that we end up just sticking fall veggies where e...

Our last quadrant of the master plan is the driveway quadrant: This sunny section is perfect for summer crops like corn, which will take up the center C. This year we will plant all the corn at once to try to ensure more thorough pollination so our sad "failure to pollinate" problem (read: not much corn) doesn't happen again. Other sun-lovers in this bed include lots of tomatoes — they take up the whole right and bottom sides. Although we're planning on the same number of Romas for preserving, we decided to space our heirloom vining varieties out more, which will result in fewer plants but an easier harvest. We lost a bunch of tomatoes last year to broken trellising twine , so this is the right move. We also plan to go back to our old system of using giant wooden stakes instead of a frame with twine, which just wasn't sturdy enough for our giant tomato plants.  On the left hand side is the completion of the nightshade for the season: eggplan...

Here’s yet another section of the garden all planned out for spring planting: The workshop quadrant was pretty easy as well (I think it all went down more smoothly this year). All along the top are more perennial herbs and our grapes, which have been locked in place since last year , and down the right side is a shady section that we had long been planning to use for early salad greens (known on the plan as our "cool season rows"). Last year we had Brussels sprouts fail here because a nearby maple tree creates too much shade once it leafs out. Our cunning plan for this year is to get cool season stuff like beets, carrots, radishes, lettuces, and other greens started in a cold frame in that section long before the tree leafs out in May. If those plants are mature by then, the shade of the tree can actually help keep them from bolting in the summer heat, making good use of a difficult little planting spot. We'll see if it works — we have several succession plan...

This is another fairly easy quadrant to plan, because (like the patio quadrant ) it has a big section of perennial plantings that don't change from year to year. In this section, the left side is our asparagus bed, and across the top we have a line of grapes and our perennial herbs (more detail about that can be found on last year's master plan ):  Many of our sun-loving, warm weather veggies went into this section (for good reason — it's never in the shade!). Along the right hand side are tomatillos (just three this year instead of four) and cantaloupe (just one hill instead of three), with a path border of nasturtiums at the entryway. This is a section that is smaller than last year, as we found that we couldn't keep up with all the tomatillos, and that we just don't love cantaloupe enough to plant more than one hill of them. Sure, they're delicious right off the vine, but we are hoping that our berries come in this summer as well, so we cut back on ...

Over the weekend we put the finishing touches on this planting season's master plan. To do this, we had to spread out the old drawings so we could keep an eye on our crop rotation, since we don't want to grow plants of the same family in the same areas again. Although it takes some effort to take into account sunlight, rotation, succession planting, and seasonal plantings, I found this to be an easier task this year than it was last year. The garden feels "real" to us now, after spending a full season living and working in it. It's a physical memory rather than just a dream on paper, and that made it much easier to find a home for everything. We also were able to tweak the amounts of food we're going to plant based on last year's yields, so that's another example of how all that research is paying off to make life easier this time around. In fact, it was so much easier to visualize that we cut the scale of our drawing in half — this year a square...

Here we are … the plans for the final quadrant! This section is close to the house and to the right, near the gate to the driveway. The path on the left is the central brick path; the path on the right leads to the garage and workshop. To the far left, a long, skinny row along the brick path will be trellised cucumbers. The section below the gravel entry path will be for pickling; the section above for salads. Behind the pickling cucumbers will be tomatillos. We planted these together at the Red House and it worked well. Behind the salad cucumbers will be mustard plants. These are going out kind of late (in May), but they are mostly for mustard seeds and not for greens (although we'll pick some greens while they are still young and tender to add to salads). We grew mustard and harvested seeds before at the Red House, but did not have time to process them before we moved, so we ended up chalking that up as a loss. We are looking forward to trying again! Along the botto...

This quadrant is at the far end of the garden from the house, on the right side when looking out the back door. The brick path that runs along its right side goes from the house to the workshop. Like its mirror image to the left of the center brick path, this quadrant also has grapes and herbs running along the back bed that borders the lawn.  In the bed that runs up and down along the left side, we marked off five foot long areas. Instead of planting different vegetables in each area, we are using the areas for succession plantings of the same items at different times. In each five-foot section will be carrots, radishes, lettuce, beets, Swiss chard, bok choy, spinach, radicchio, and arugula. These will be planted in 6-inch wide rows (our favorites will be doubled up) that go across the bed the short way — another pretty intensive planting. These plants will be sown directly in the first section on April 14, then again every two weeks until the last sowing on May 26 (th...

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...

It's here! We finished the garden plans last weekend, but I'm just now getting around to writing about it. It was a long and sometimes frustrating process to take crop rotation and seasonal sowing into account, but I think we finally have everything under control. These are big grids, made by taping four pieces of graph paper together. One square is 6 inches. Here is the patio quadrant: This section is, when looking out the kitchen door, to the left and nearest the house. As discussed before, the far left bed of this quadrant contains the strawberries (although as only 1/4 of that area will be planted out this spring, there is also plenty of space for an extra-early, experimental cold frame of salad greens that we'll plant this coming weekend if the weather is good. It has been far too mild a winter to pass up a chance at some early veggies!). Across the bottom are the other perennials, including (from the center outward) lavender, rhubarb, and roses . Along the ri...