Aggressive Expansion - Garden 2010

This year I finally decided to face the facts: 1) Our garden area doesn't get enough sunlight to grow certain vegetables (read: corn); 2) You can jam a whole bunch of plants into limited space but that doesn't mean you will get more veggies...you will probably get fewer.

With these two hard-knocks lessons learned over the past two years, I revamped our garden layout resulting in 1/4 less planting area and fewer plants in the area that remained. I thought it would be harder to do than it was; I guess two years of (relative) failure have taught me a valuable lesson in gardening: Less is More!

Here's the new setup:

Bottom Box: Green Beans, Beets, Spinach
Middle Box: Pole Peas, Potatoes (Red, Yukon Gold, Russet)
Top Box: Pole Peas, Carrots, Lettuce

We have to cover up our boxes with chicken "wire" (this kind is plastic) to keep some neighborhood cat out of our garden. I tried to permanently deter it using a tip from the internet: sprinkle hot pepper flakes in your soil to send the cat packing. It didn't work. So it looks like chicken wire it is. I've also got a new watering system in place because that soaker tubing I used last year ended up being woefully inadequate. This time around I'm using the little mini-sprinklers; they have their problems too but I think they will be better in the end, especially come summertime.
This is my first time growing potatoes. I bought some seed potatoes but also planted some Russets that had started to sprout in our cupboard. They're growing just as well as the others so don't fret if you cannot find any legit seed potatoes to plant; grocery store kind will grow too. I'm so excited! Growing potatoes always seemed intimidating to me because you can't just buy a bag of seeds at the store and throw them in the ground.

We got some raspberry bushes from my dad last year and planted them in our backyard. That first year they didn't do much and I pruned them down to the nub in the fall (as I had been instructed in a church gardening class). Later I learned that some raspberry varieties only bear fruit on one-year old stalks. D'oh! Well, at least we'll have some good looking one-year old stalks to give us fruit next year. I also got some free broccoli starts from a friend in the ward and decided to plant them in a pot to see how that would work. I figured a pot planting would give them exclusive space to grow and spread as they desired, hopefully giving us a nice yield. They haven't done much yet though.

After all this was planted I started to lament how there were certain things I was never going to be able to grow in our yard: corn, melons, anything requiring full sun. I remembered that one little section of our back yard gets direct sunlight most of the day and wondered if there was a way I could capitalize on that. I decided to do a time-lapse sun study just to be sure. Below are the May 4, 2010 results:

Then I told Mitzi that I wanted to rip out about 12" to 24" along our fence because that section of our yard gets the most sun of anywhere in our yard. To my surprise she agreed, and then she took it a step further and said we should go whole hog, tearing out the entire sideyard section and turning it into a garden. That was a little overwhelming, especially since I wasn't looking forward to digging up so much grass. In the end I decided just to use our discarded fourth box to build however much of a garden box on top of the grass that I could. Here's how it turned out:

In this box we planted cantaloupe, cucumber, more potatoes, and even corn! That's right, I think we may get enough sun on this garden to grow corn! We'll see how it turns out - I'm skeptical but willing to be surprised.

We also planted a strawberry plant in a hanging pot left here by the previous home owners. They have several and I think I might make some Babylonian hanging gardens of strawberries around our yard.

I'm so excited at the possibilities of this new garden! Stay tuned for updates!