garden

Spring Planning: Expanding the Garden

Last summer was, shall we say, a learning experience in how to layout your garden and what not to plant in your greenhouse.

I remember in the first house in Spokane that I grew up in, there was a vegetable garden and the back corner had a bunch of raspberry bushes. I don’t remember much other than my mom tended to the plants and there’s some vaguely fuzzy memory of a young me out there with her. So I don’t really remember much about gardening.

Last year I went all out, for a first time gardener anyway, without planning the best place to plant things. My herbs thrived, but the cucumbers and peas and beans I planted in the greenhouse…did not. Turns out you need a trellis for all of those things. Not to mention they shouldn’t block other plants from getting their sun. Let’s just say my carrots were very much baby carrots due to that mishap.

We didn’t have a ton of room anyway for large vegetable plants. We had one garden bed apart from the greenhouse and I planted 6 zucchini plants.

6.

Do you know how large zucchini gets and how much one plant produces? Too big and too much for two people to eat. Duly noted, 2 or 3 zucchini plants will be enough this year.

By mid-summer, the greenhouse was delightfully, well, green and bursting with plants, but I had ripped out the only crop of peas and beans because it wasn’t going well, and that was frustrating to know you failed and it was too late in the season to start anything new.

I successfully harvested tomatoes, zucchini and a few cucumbers as well as other herbs but I knew we would need to expand the garden for next summer. So in the late autumn, after I had planted garlic to overwinter, I started sketching out my not-to-scale plans for the new beds I wanted to add.


Look at my garlic go!

Ryan made some more precise to-scale sketches, and then when January rolled around and we were hit with unusually warm temperatures in the 50s, he began to dig out the new beds. Which has been an adventure all in itself because of how utterly rocky the soil is.

Ryan built a sifter to help catch the smaller rocks but as you can see, we have some *massive* rocks in our yard.

And that’s as far as we’ve gotten because suddenly winter decided to appear and drop a foot and a half of snow on us and the Seattle area. So as soon as the snow melts, because it hasn’t in our neighborhood, the digging will continue and we’ll go from there.

xx
Stephanie

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1 Comment

  • Reply
    Aki!
    February 26, 2019 at 9:56 pm

    Gorgeous! I’ve never planted as much as a small seed, so this is pretty cool to see!

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