Planning the Garden

Each of the past 2 years I have had a small garden at the house. The first year was OK for a year-one garden, but last year was terrible. I got cucumbers and some early lettuce, but pretty much everything else was awful (it would be fair to say that the tomatoes were a crime against gardening... it makes me embarrassed just thinking about it).

This year I am determined to have a successful garden. I am putting more planning into building soil structure, what will be planted, when it will be planted, and then maintaining the garden through to harvest.

First, I must give thanks to the December ice storm. That's right, the storm that wiped out power to our house for 6 days (making us homeless nomads), damaged my precious deck, and destroyed trees on our property (and all throughout central mass), did have a silver lining. By destroying trees, the ice storm opened up a lot more light to the garden! Based on this new light, I added 100 square feet to one end of my garden last weekend (on the left side of this picture).


I also have started a garden journal of sorts. I feel like calling it a journal is odd when I have only this years plan written in it, but its a start.


We also have started a few seeds and put it in a light box. My wife started 4 varieties of her tomatoes (one is in the mail) and tonight I started the celeriac. The celeriac is definitely an experiment since 6 months ago I had no idea such a thing existed. We got a couple from the CSA last summer and I think it is tasty and interesting. We'll see how it goes.


Now, I am off to collect the ingredients to build the soil structure for my "new" garden. I want this to be as much of an organic garden as possible, but I don't think that will be all that easy. When I called the garden center one town over and asked them about some of the stuff mentioned in the organic gardening book I have, I might as well have been speaking mandarin. So I may have to do a little extra hunting to find this stuff, but the adventure should be fun!