Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Garden Planning

I have great news for those of you who love to grow your own vegetables but really have no idea what you are doing (like me!). There is this seed company nearby called Territorial Seed. I get their emails now since I signed up for their catalog and on Friday I received an email about this new tool they have to help you plan your garden!

It is amazing - you can draw out the area that you have to plant, they have just about every fruit and vegetable you can imagine, and you drag and drop what you want to plant. Each plant takes up the amount of space it needs and you can drag to expand each plant into rows or blocks. Also? It will remember what you planted from year to year and warn you where not to plant the same things next year so it helps you with all that crop rotation stuff!

Then, once you have laid out your garden you can go to your plant list and it will tell you (based on where you live, no less!) when you should start plants inside, when you should plant them outside, and when to harvest! Amazing, right? Well I really love it because my attention span for reading all those gardening books is pretty short plus they are never quite relevant enough to the exact climate I live in.

You can check it out here: Garden Planner. It's free for 30 days if you just want to plan your garden for this year, or you can pay an annual fee for continuing access and the ability to plan your garden year after year! Here is what our garden will look like this year (or at least I think...):

garden, garden plan, garden design
We took a mini road trip down to their store in Cottage Grove this weekend to pick up the seeds we needed and got a few other things for the garden. I can't wait to get started! Most of the stuff needs to start indoors still and a few things will go outside next month. Jonathan has been building a hoop house over one of our raised beds, so hopefully even if we have a cooler start to the summer again we can still get a decent crop!


If you have your own vegetable garden how do you go about planning and deciding what to plant? I'm still pretty new to this, so any suggestions would be wonderful!

-C
Posted by courtney at 10:10 PM
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2 comments:

  1. RomaMarch 17, 2011 at 7:39 PM

    C-This sounds so exciting! Love your garden plan and think you've planted great things! Are the sunflowers for fun or shade or will you toast the seeds? Is that basil or parsley in the box above cilantro?
    I remember reading a great book called Square Foot Gardening or something like that when we lived in Kzoo and turned Jonathan's sandbox into a type of raised bed garden. If it's still in print, you might enjoy it.
    Can't wait to see your garden in July! Good luck:)

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  2. courtneyMarch 19, 2011 at 9:32 AM

    Hi Roma!

    The sunflowers are both for fun and seeds - I've never grown them before but we have a good spot for it so I thought we should give it a try! The box above the cilantro is basil... I did have parsley somewhere, but now I'm not sure what happened to it! I'm not very good at leaving the recommended space between plants - I just want to squeeze everything in!

    I hope things are growing well when you come to visit!

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