Plan, plant, prosper
We’ve been happy-hazard gardeners for… well, a long time.
The garden has always been a nice extra more than a depended on essential.
No good reason. Lack of planning really.
The “grocery store” mentality is go fetch it. Planning generally is a week ahead, certainly not 6 months ahead.
If you want the full deal of gardening – seed to harvest – you must plan.
Most of the stuff we’ve grown has been by transplants purchased from a nursery. We’ve done some stuff by seed… but again, not well planned.
We’re doing more planning now…
We’ll be keeping (written) track of what was grown where so we can properly rotate crops.
We’ll be plotting out a calendar so we can grow everything from seed. The calendar will plot out what we have to do when. This is certainly dependent on your growing zone. We’re in zone 9. (You can check your zone here).
This will give us more choice of what to grow rather than being limited to what’s available at the nursery when we happen to go.
And, we’ll be adding more garden boxes.
Currently we have about 240 square feet of beds for mostly vegetables, some herbs, a few berry plants.
There’s also herbs in pots and a number of fruit trees (persimmon, pineapple guava, two tangerine, blood orange, kiefer lime, meyer lemon, apricot, lemon).
The lemon tree is mature and produces well. The kiefer and meyer are potted and don’t produce too much. The other trees and berries are all under two years and not yet productive.
Most of the fruit trees are in the front yard which was “improved” in 2006 by removing a Spruce tree and a bunch of hedges and miscellaneous shrubs.
The front yard is tight, so the trees will be trimmed to about 8′. The three citrus have been planted to form a hedge… an edible and sweet smelling hedge.
The front yard gets a lot of sun. While the fruit trees are still small, we pop a couple melon plants out there during the summer. Last year we got some huge watermelon as well as cantelope and crane melons.
This year we have a watermelon and some other melon. We haven’t had much heat so they’re a bit behind.
After the summer growing season winds down we’ll be re-organizing the beds in the back yard. We’re going to be adding another 120 square feet of beds.
I’ve read people eat about 300 pounds of veggies and fruit a year. (As a vegetarian I’m no doubt on the high side).
I’ve also read you can produce 1 to 3 pounds of produce per square foot with intensive urban agriculture.
There’s two of us, so that would pencil out to 200-600 SF of growing space.
By bumping up our growing space to 360 sf, plus assorted pots, plus fruit trees, we should do fairly well IF we work at optimizing the growth.
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