Garden Planning

So this weekend was so busy that I just didn't get a chance to blog.  Saturday was a mild 45F and so we took the opportunity to turn the compost and cut down the plants that still needed to be cleaned up for spring.  It was so nice to be outside.  But the most garden work actually came on Sunday - inside the house.  It was garden planning day.

When planning the garden I need to visualize the garden beds, and for some unknown reason I need that visual to be to scale.  Why?  I don't know.  But those tiny little books, the apps, the websites...don't work.  I need to spread it out in front of me, large enough to make sense, and for me to write in the names of the veggies I will plant and how many.  So I have created two drawings of our two main vegetable gardens, with each one square inch representing 1 square foot. 

Here are my drawings:

I used these last year and wanted to re-use them this year, so we sat and went over the grid lines in permanent fine tip marker.  The paths are clearly laid out as you can see. 

Here are the garden beds - the main garden in the front, the garage garden behind, what else, the garage:

We have about 185 square feet of planting space in these two gardens and a major part of this whole process is figuring out what veggies can be planted near the others and which cannot.  For example, onions don't like legumes, so I have to make sure that I don't plant them where I had beans or peas last year, and that I don't plant beans or peas near them this year.  For this process I use The Vegetable Gardner's Bible - Smith is very clear about what veggies are good companions for each other and which are not. 

I was up until midnight last night doing this planning - spreading out my seed packets, looking up companions, and filling in the garden squares.  The crazy thing is that I'll probably revisit the plan a number of times this week, "just making sure".