Relentless Inquiry

A co-worker, upon hearing I was doing garden planning, asked if I used CAD/CAM software. Nope, I told him, Powerpoint! 🙂

Usually I use graph paper, but I couldn’t find my pad and darn it, I’d been meaning to come up with a template for a while. What I really want are Square Foot Garden colorforms (remember colorforms?!)

First pass at this year’s garden plan. 2008 was a disaster since I couldn’t compensate for overcrowding with painstaking near-daily garden care: too busy at my employee job.

Note that I have already impulsively purchased two plants which are NOT IN THE PLAN, a Black Krim tomato and a Lolita summer squash. (What are they thinking, naming something that should be picked before it’s ripe, with a name like that?! If it weren’t an All-America winner, I would not have gotten it. Ugh.

Oh, um, and the tray of Early Butternut was SO CUTE and fuzzy and cotyledon-y with those little sawtooth true leaves just starting. So, um, I picied that up too, but I know just where they are going to go, in that area by the fig tree along the side. (cough)

For our community garden bed, we are planning to do mostly a 3 Sisters setup this year. I blanked at the last minute on whether the beds are 14 or 18 feet long. If they’re 12 feet, I am going to have to edit severely, but I am fairly certain they’re at least 14 feet.

We were almost the only ones growing corn at the community garden in 2008. There were maybe 3 or 4 other plots, of the 70-plus, with corn, and at least one of those was baby corn.

We’re going to go with a nice healthy anthocyanin favorite, Sweet Double Red Corn. It’s supposed to be good for fresh, parched, or flour consumption. I’m itching to try my Hopi Blue or to get some Painted Mountain Flour Corn, but let’s plant what we already have for now.

My little 4×6 corn patch last year did pretty well, but should have been spaced better. The squirrels ruined a really excessive number of ears– wish they’d finish one before trashing another. With an alleged top height of 5 feet, the Sweet Double Red should be eas(ier) to net off, unlike the 7 – 9 foot ears of the Golden Queen F1 we grew last year.

I’m happy to make the .PPT file available, as soon as I clear up the question about the CSG bed length.