I cannot tell you how excited I am to be getting back to the “roots” (haha, get it??) of this blog. This spring/summer, we’re going to have a garden again!! Garden plans have been simmering on the back of my brain ever since we moved in to our house (with a YARD!) and the other day, I got an email from a good friend describing her herb garden. That brought garden planning to the front of my mind. Over the weekend, Husband and I sat down and did a little garden pre-planning. We made a master list of what crops we would grow in our dream garden, and then whittled it down to something a little more reasonable for our first in-ground garden.
Okay, so we didn’t reduce our list by much…. 😉
We’re going with our old favorites of tomatoes, cucumbers, and bell peppers, as well as loose-leaf lettuce (for me, mostly) and fresh herbs: parsley, basil, and chives.
New for us this year (besides the whole in-ground part of it!) are sweet corn, watermelon, and butternut squash–things that weren’t quite possible in pots on our balcony!. I haven’t picked out any varieties yet, because I’ll do that when I go to a local garden store. Hopefully someone there will be able to recommend varieties that are good for my area.
You can see that I also sketched out a little plan of where our garden plots (yes, that is plural!) will be. After discussion, Husband and I decided that we’ll try to have one plot in the corner of the fence in the back yard, and one plot along the side of the house in the side yard. (In the sketch, the upward direction is south.) When we moved in last summer, I tried to keep track of the sunniest parts of our yard, and I think these are the spots. I hope!
Because we’re in upstate NY, we still have snow (of course!), so here’s what the proposed garden plots look like right now (yes, I actually put on my boots to slog around our yard to take these photos!! :))… But I am so looking forward to when we can see green again!
I also looked up the last and first frost dates. I found a handy-dandy chart on almanac.com that has dates for a lot of cities in the U.S. (The site also has some recommended planting dates based on your area!**). It looks like I have about a month before I should start planting some of my seeds, and I’ll start the rest at the end of March.
Some problems that I *know* we’ll face:
- The backyard, while it does have sunny spots, is still pretty shady. (Husband pointed out, though, that it doesn’t get much worse than a northern exposure on a covered balcony!)
- There might be issues with tree roots in the corner plot. I won’t know for sure until the snow goes away how bad the roots will be.
- Squirrels. Holy moly, we have a lot of squirrels. And a resident chipmunk (a.k.a. Chippy ;-), right Jaime?) under our deck. I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything that can be done to prevent them from getting into a garden. If you have any squirrel-proofing advice, PLEASE please PLEASE share!
But here’s to the coming spring and to gardens! Hurray!
**This is the first time I’ve used this site, so I don’t know anything about its validity. If you have experience with it, I’d love to hear your opinion!
I’m not sure about squirrels, but Ellie told me to plant herbs around my vegetables to help keep away animal pests that might destroy the crop.
Something that really helped for us is putting down freshly cut hair (I usually did it after I cut Nat’s hair) around and in the garden to keep away the rabbits. I never really had problems with rabbits, so I guess it worked pretty well. I think the key is to use freshly cut hair and doing it every couple of weeks. The scent of human supposedly keeps the rabbits away.
Thanks for the advice, Ramona. I’ll definitely have to remember to try the hair idea. I don’t have to cut Joel’s hair very often (thankfully, haha, because I kind of hate doing it!) but maybe when it gets warmer, I’ll cut it outside so I have easy access to the garden!
I am planning on having most of my herbs in pots so that I can have them closer to the house, but maybe I’ll get extras so that I can have them in the ground around the vegetables, too! 🙂 I can always use extra herbs!
[…] me to the other main point of this blog post: the garden plot. After doing some more investigation after the snow finally melted, we decided that the area in the backyard was too full of big tree roots to be a good idea. So […]