Resolution updates: #3

My third resolution was to plan this year's garden before it was too late to put anything in the ground. And I have to say, while I am slightly behind the curve on a few crops, for the most part the planning is coming along pretty well! And I haven't even broken out into hives yet.

I started my planning by doing two things. First, I bought a gardening book from Lowe's that gives details on sowing, growing, and harvesting individual crops. Second, after two years of dragging my feet, I took advantage of a free soil sample test from our local Cooperative Extension office, which will let me know whether our soil is neutral, alkaline, or acidic so I will know what to add to amend it. The results won't be in for another week or two, but I'm glad to know that we won't just be throwing money into our garden without any idea of whether we are actually doing it any good. I also recently learned that most cities have a facility where residents can pick up free compost. I'll have to look into that pretty soon, because that would certainly save a nice chunk of change as well.

To decide which new crops to add to our garden this year, I combed through all the veggies mentioned in the book I bought for ideas. The book gave me several good tips on what would or would not withstand Southern summers as well as what to plant when. For example, I learned that I had missed the boat on planting garlic, because it takes 9 months to harvest and should be planted in the Fall. Oops.

So now it was time to map out our garden. Among the many happy little finds we stumbled across in Charlottesville, one of them was a magazine's mention of gardeners.com. This website offers both pre-planned garden maps and a tool for mapping out your own design. This was a huge help for me. Not only does this feature clearly identify how many seeds or plants should be planted in one square foot area, it also provides tips and dates for planting. After using this website, our planning was pretty much complete. We knew what we wanted to plant and what we had room for, and we also knew which plants we wouldn't be able to grow from seed because of lack of time.

Now the weeds have been tilled out of our poor neglected garden plot, and we have a few plants and seeds ready to go in the ground. Consider this your before picture. :) Eddie and Lily are happy to model this soon-to-be-filled space for you.


Where's the catnip?