It's been a while since our last post, but that doesn't mean we haven't been gardening. As the title of the blog suggests, our back yard is roughly the size of a postage stamp. However, we've decided to allocate roughly 50% of the square footage of the backyard to vegetables, plus some large pots here and there. This actually turns out to be a pretty substantial area when it is all built and filled in with
dirt.
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| Roger filling the raised vegetable bed with dirt. |
Roger took a super organized approach to planning our garden. I would like to say we both did, but to be honest I am just along for the ride (and the vegetables). First we needed to decide what to plant. Our decision variables were: how much we personally liked a particular vegetable, expected yield per square foot, days to maturity, and suitability for our climate. Then we created scores for each potential candidate to to help us decide how much of each vegetable to plant and when.
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| Excerpt from our vegetable scoring system |
Next up is deciding when and where to plant. You might be thinking, "Wow did they run a multivariate optimization to decide which vegetables to grow? Losers." No, we didn't do that. We used our scores as a guide, with the understanding that this growing season will be all about trial and error. Our favorites from this year will make the cut for next year's crop, we'll probably drop some, and add a few new ones too. Based on our choices, here is a map of our garden for this year and a planting schedule:
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| Planting and harvesting schedule. |
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| Garden map. |
The observant reader will note that planting started way back in February. Indeed! In our next posts we will cover early season plantings and whatever else we can think of.
