Friday, March 29, 2013

. . .a Four Season Kitchen Garden??

Spring is here, and a new and improved kitchen garden is in the works at The Maplewood. While last year's garden yielded plenty of gorgeous and tasty veggies and herbs, we seemed to be harvesting for only short stints throughout the growing season. Not to mention, our zucchini plants got hit with the deadly Squash Vine Borer (for the second season in a row!) and we lost all our zukes and yellow squash plants early on.

This year, we have some new strategies in place! I'm very excited to be playing a major role in the planning and coordination of this season's garden. One of the main goals of our upcoming garden, is to extend the growing season and ensure we are harvesting continuously throughout the entire season. Ideally, I'm actually aiming to create a true four season garden! If done properly, utilizing deep mulch and cold frames, we could be harvesting lettuce in the middle of January. . how exciting! By maximizing the potential of our small plot, we will greatly reduce how much produce we need to purchase over the year. But of course, this will take a lot of planning and coordination.

The Kitchen Garden status as of 03/28/13
. . ..after a long, hard winter
I've already started the layout and planning process of the garden, using an awesome online planning tool I stumbled upon, called Vegetable Garden Planner. The Vegetable Garden Planner seems like the perfect tool to help with the logistics of staging many different crops over an extended period of time. And as I plan and research potential contenders for the upcoming garden, I am also ramping up for some physical work outside. As the ground thaws, it's now time to begin preparations of the soil. Research continues on what amendments will best serve our particular soil conditions, and over the next few weeks, the actual clean up will begin.

I realize that the plans for this season's garden are lofty, but I'm confident we can achieve all this and more.
It's going to be a long row to hoe, but it will be well worth it in the end!

1 comment: