Plan

I needed some serious help with planning.  Since I had no idea what I was doing I knew visuals would be most helpful.  I needed a way to start envisioning our backyard transformation from dirt to vegetable garden.

Searching online for how to come up with garden plans I came across ‘The Garden Planner’ from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.  So who are they?  Well they were founded in 1792, so a wealth of knowledge.  And they had a tool to lay out a garden plan by measuring your yard.  I can do that!  Once I know that I could plot out how many raised beds I can get in the space I have, and how much I should plant in each bed.  I felt like I struck gold, and I could try it free for seven days.

We measured every inch of the backyard.  How much had dirt, how much had concrete, what space was already taken by plants or trees that were not going to be removed from the backyard.  Yes, it had a look and feel like I was playing a game.  So that made it fun!  I was learning information about plants, and which ones to put together in the same bed.  I literally spent hours and days.  It finally felt like I was getting organized.  Finally I could envision it.  Here was my initial plan:

(picture with permission of  Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Planner)

Living in the middle of a city, I had one-tenth of an acre that I could plant on.  We have an East facing backyard and the South side-yard is wider than the North-side.  So we have good morning and mid-day sun and some shade starts in the backyard in the late afternoon from the shadow of the house.  I only have one tree which casts some shade in our yard.  We have a very old Lemon/Orange/Tangerine tree in the back South-East corner.  Yes, someone grafted three trees in one, years ago.  The tangerines have lots of seeds but they are super sweet, so we juice them mainly.  But the tree is a heavy producer, and I love it.  It stays!  There was one problem though, it was a beast towering up into the powerlines and over both neighbor’s fences.  It needed to be tamed, and this needed to be done before we got our raised beds in.  So we began trimming it in the fall.

Here are a couple photos of the tree and how much we trimmed off of it:

So now with that taken care of, we began plotting out my drawn-up plans from ‘The Garden Planner’.  We rototilled half the yard, and then my husband built the raised beds.

We were on a little bit of a roll and got the first five rows of raised beds done in about 3-weeks’ time.  Then, well, you know, because of life…..we got the last two rows of raised beds built about two months after that.

My plan had taken shape and my excitement level was rising!