The planned garden

This blog is for my colleague and friend's husband, who was interested in my square foot planting method and all the produce I can get from a thoughtfully designed space.  Nate - I hope this is interesting!  While you've seen my garden plan here, I couldn't plant the garden exactly as I planned it.  Close.  But the self-seeded dill took over where I wanted to plant the peppers, and thus I had to move stuff around a bit.  The most important thing was to keep the good companion plants together - and not plant bad companions next to each other.

Here is what the garden looked like before I left for Florida:

On the nearer side of the garden, from right to left I have dill, basil, carrots, then peas, basil again, and onions.  On the far left, outside of the photo are the tomato plants.  On the far side (again right to left) are the haricots verts, next to eggplant, which are next to pepper plants and then the onions again. (Onions don't like legumes and so I needed to keep them away from this year's planting and at the same time I had to make sure they were in soil that I hadn't planted legumes in last year - apparently they really don't like peas and beans.)  And finally, once again, just outside the photo (but a you can see a bit) are the tomatoes on the far left.

Here's a picture of the entire garden (I take pictures from this angle all year long to record how the garden progresses):

In this picture you can see the tomatoes at this curvy end of the garden, along with nasturtiums which are interplanted with them.  They are great companion plants, and the nasturtium flowers make the tomato space look decorative.

This is the key: plant in the square foot style, and only put plants that like each other next to each other.  Generations of farmers have experimented with this for us - Louise Riotte, for example, who wrote "Carrots Love Tomatoes" - and I go by the rules they have come up with.  Why repeat the experiment when we can learn from others?  So far so good.