I love gardening. I love the feel of dirt in my hands. I love the taste of fresh, homegrown vegetables. I love that my kids love the garden vegetables. I love that it is a hobby I can share with my husband. I also love the continuing learning through trial and error the garden brings.
My first “garden” was a 2 foot by 3 foot container garden that sat on my porch. I had read Mel Barthomew’s Square Foot Garden and quickly caught the gardening buzz; however, I had a five month old baby and did not know if I had the time to devote to a garden. Hence my option for a small garden. I grew tomatoes, carrots, and herbs in that small container porch garden. It was my first experience growing tomatoes vertically, and for three tomato plants, it was a bumper crop. I was so excited about gardening that my husband built me two raised beds for the following year’s garden.
In 2016, I had two raised beds and expanded my garden with vegetables I had never grown. I grew eggplant, green beans, okra, potatoes, broccoli, peas, and peppers in addition to tomatoes, carrots, and herbs. 2016 proved to be another successful garden venture. With the expanded space of my garden, I was able to learn and experiment with pest control, pruning, harvesting methods, and vegetable storage. I have taken the knowledge gained and implemented that into my garden plans for 2017.
My husband built me one more raised bed for the garden, so I now have three raised beds that total 138 square feet of garden space. I use Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Garden methods “almost” perfectly. I feel a large portion of my gardening success comes from Mel’s unique soil mixture. While it is an expense to make your own soil using his methods, I believe it is so vital to your garden if you are using the square foot method.
Here are my garden plans for 2017. I created the plan using Tombow Dual Brush Pens. If you want to try these pens, you can purchase them here.
Tomatoes
I grow most of my tomatoes vertically along a trellis. Growing tomatoes vertically greatly reduces the space needed for tomatoes. Indeterminate tomato varieties grow best vertically. I do grow tomatoes using the traditional method with a tomato cage. Tomatoes take up four squares when you opt to grow them in the traditional sense with a tomato cage. The tomato cage works really great for determinate tomatoes, and since the Celebrity tomato is my all time favorite variety–and it happens to be a determinate–I grow four Celebrity tomatoes using a tomato cage.
Green Beans
You can also tell that green beans are a big favorite around our house. We grow so many green beans! And, when the peas, lettuce, and spinach are done growing around the middle of June, all of those squares will be replanted with- you guessed it- green beans.
I plant bush type green beans. The packages say they only put on one set of green beans and then stop producing, but that is not what I have experienced. I planted bush varieties of green beans last year and had green beans until I finally got tired of them around the first of November. (We had a really late first frost date in 2016.)
Last year I had problems with insects in the green beans. I’ve researched that petunias help with bug problems around the green beans, so I’ll be interspersing petunias throughout the green beans. This is where I don’t follow Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Garden perfectly. Mel recommends planting four petunias in a square foot of space. I don’t dedicate an entire square foot for plants that I’m using for pest control, such as marigolds and now petunias. I plant the marigolds and petunias in the same square with the vegetable plants. (I use marigolds for pest control around my tomatoes.)
Squash, Zucchini, Watermelon, and Cantaloupe
For new vegetables in the garden, I am going to plant yellow crookneck squash, zucchini, watermelon, and cantaloupe. I’m going to grow these vertically to save space. (If grown vertically, each plant requires two square feet of space. If grown traditionally, each plant requires nine squares of space.)
I’ve always heard about these vegetables/fruits crossing with one another and producing an inedible gourd, but I’ve been doing research and from what I can tell, if they cross with each other that would only affect the seeds. Hence, it would be problematic if I saved seeds to plant the following year. Since I don’t plan on doing that, I think I am safe with planting them next to each other. This will be one of my experiments for the garden this year, because as always, part of the gardening fun is learning by trial and error.
Now, while we wait for spring, let’s enjoy some garden pictures from last year!
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-Jill
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