Planning A Vegetable Garden At Our House
by Mary
Planning a vegetable garden
When we are planning a vegetable garden, we have learned to draw up the plan AS we order the seeds, and another one as we actually planted it! Our garden is usually a flower garden with salsa go-withs. We plant our flowers toward the neighbors hoping to hide our messy working garden a bit. Sunflowers work great for this. Some years, though, we use corn to give the soil a break. We like to plant different sorts plants once in awhile which can put a squeeze on our garden site. One year we bought popcorn and Indian corn so as to show the difference between them and the sweet corn. (Popping pop corn in an old fashioned hand crank popcorn popper is one of our favorite Christmas Traditons!) Oops! How do you find enough room for all of that corn AND keep them far enough from each other in the garden so that they did not cross pollinate? We were glad we had planned at order time that year because it was still a trick by the time it came to actual planting time! Many times we will order what we think is a conservative amount of seed and wind up with extras (the Garden Catalog freebies usually tip the scales - we hate to waste any of the seed). Then we try to squeeze in more rows or fill short rows with other plants. One year we had a crazy garden since we had ordered from 4 garden catalogs that each sent out more freebies than the main items we had ordered! Be sure to mark the germination and picking dates on the same paper so you can transfer the dates to your calendar! We risked our corn crop one year that might ought to have been picked when we were on a trip! And certainly should have been picked sooner than we recovered from the trip. Thank God it was a long keeper variety. 'Hope this idea is a help for those who are planning a vegetable garden for next year! Mary St. Anne's Helper Click here to read or post comments. |
