Planning My Future Garden

Planning is one of my favorite things to do - although the execution is a little harder!  I really need to get on my seed starting, but I am still trying to figure out what I am planting this year.  I am making pretty good headway and hopefully I will be back later this week with an update.  Since I am building my first set of garden beds this year, I also need to have an idea of what I want to accomplish with my final garden plan.  I worked on a couple of different ideas, but I think the one above is the one I like the most.  I am hoping the shed will be able to be closer to the fence so there will be a little more room between the beds and the shed, but I am still working on figuring that out :)

It's definitely ambitious, but I really want to have enough space to grow most of what we will eat while not taking over the entire yard.  There is approximately 20' between the beds and the house, which I think will work well (at least there will be less mowing!).  I still need to go out and stake all of the corners, just to make sure it works as well in real life as it does on paper - fingers-crossed!!

I have decided to do a Mostly Square Foot garden with some good Companion Planting thrown in, which will maximize the amount of growing space I will have.  I will do a little more explaining when I get my first bed planned out.  For this year I wanted to keep it manageable - not only do I need to build all the beds but I still work full-time and will not have as much time as I hope to in the future.  So money and time are definitely a big factor in taking it slow - even if I do want to build and plant all of the beds RIGHT NOW...lol

So in the next few weeks I need to finalize my first veggie bed, plant my first set of starts, decide what I want the beds to look like (how high, what type of wood/box) and figure out what I want to put in-between the boxes (I hate walking on bark, but it is the easiest - but the tiny gnat bugs are the worst!// gravel is kind of a mess if it gets in the grass// grass will just become weeds because there isn't enough room to mow :/ ).  I better get it figured out - I have to have the garden beds built by the end of March!!

Anyone else getting ready to garden?  I am so excited, I hope I can make it all work!

Have a great day!
Beth