Our second year of four larger raised beds has been planted.  I am still so proud of our raised beds.  I saw plans for them online, but build them myself last year out of cedar and topped the corner posts with copper fence toppers.  I sealed the beds again this Spring before I planted.

We have done a lot of research last summer regarding gardening by the foot- which shoves things a little closer and more symmetrically than I would normally tend to do.  We also like the garden to look nice, since it is front and center in  our back yard, so that increased the importance of nice beds and incorporating plants for visual appeal- even if we aren’t going to really eat them.

Our plan for the garden is as follows:

Garden 09

The chives and oregano came back this year.  The mint didn’t, which we have a big pot on the patio.  It came back when we had it in the garden, but the pot must have gotten too cold?  Our daughter planted seeds at her school, so we got lots of small seedlings for the garden this year.  We are trying onions for the first time- tons of them and sticking with our tendency to go really heavy on the tomatoes- since we love them so much.  This year we also went heavy on the basil, since we never seem to have enough.  We are also doing a lot of lettuce, since that is always a favorite.  We didn’t really have much luck last year with cauliflower, broccoli and chinese cabbages.  We tried red cabbage in it’s place- a new plant for us.  We are also doing more peas than beans this year because peas as so good for you and delicious too.  Last year too the tomatoes got huge, so they choked out things in their shadow.  We may have helped with this by planting things that are early summer to the north of them.  We can always plant more lettuces too if something doesn’t get enough sun- that is if lettuces will sprout for us in those areas.

One other thing that we are sort of sad to be lacking this year is cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash.  We had some awesome crops last year, but the vines took over the yard and killed a ton of grass… and with a small yard- we decided to avoid things that spread our horizontally.

Goals for our summer garden:

Eat everything that we grow.

Grow things that we know we will eat- rather than purely experiment.

Spread out the harvest throughout the summer- so that we have both early and late harvested food.