Fall Garden Prep, pt 2
If you haven’t read part 1 of Planning a Fall Garden, go do that first!
Ok, now you’re ready! So after some reflection at the end of this past winter, I knew I wanted to make some changes when planting my next fall/winter garden. A few things I learned: winter plants take up a TON of space! Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Collard Greens, Mustard Greens - they each need a full square foot or more for one plant! That’s a lot of space when you “only” have 4 - 4’x4’ boxes. Broccoli and Brussels are kind of a “one shot” type of plant. Meaning, once you get your one head of broccoli or your one stalk of Brussels, that’s it (I am assuming cauliflower works the same way but I am not a fan of that veggie so I don’t grow it). Yes … broccoli will produce small little side shoots after cutting the main head that you can eat but nothing like the original. So that means if you want to eat those veggies for more than just one meal, you need multiple plants going at once. Again - that’s a lot of space. Oh and where I planted mine was not ideal - I only had about 4 hours of sunlight. So things grew much more slowly than if I had them in a sunnier location. Instead of eating Brussels with our Thanksgiving dinner, we were eating it for New Year’s. See, it’s important to reflect on the previous growing season!
So what next? This week, I want you to focus on drawing out your garden. Here’s how:
Measure your growing space.
Transfer those scaled-down measurements to paper.
Draw a grid on top of the drawing to indicate 1’x1’ spaces (this is just for reference when figuring out how many plants can be put in a single square foot).
Now for the fun part! Take some time this week to look through seed catalogs online or the old-fashioned way (that’s my favorite - I love the smell of catalog pages. Anybody else? No??) Start making a list of the plants you would like to start growing.
That’s it. We’ll tackle figuring out the planting plan in our next post. It’s important to do a little at a time and not get too overwhelmed!
