The Fall Garden Goes In - Garden Planning

Much of the fall garden went in today! I'm a little bit hesitant about putting in the cold weather crops this early in August, which can be pretty brutal around here, but I'm hopeful they'll do well since the garden only gets 5 hours of sun during August. Once the leaves fall when it cools off, things will get about two to three hours more sun which will be nice.

Most of you have probably moved on to planning your gardens on computer programs like Autocad or the Google Sketch-up. I've even seen ones done in Exel or Powerpoint. Honestly, I look at those programs and hyperventilate. I still rely on paper and pencil. I've always worked with graph paper, but that meant paper all over the place. This year I found a spiral, graph paper notebook. I have three 'gardens' and they all can't fit on one page. Now I can have a page for each and just flip between them. What's better, is that I can color coordinate the grids with the season and have them ALL in the same place so when I planted the late summer beans that will still be producing when the fall garden goes in, I went ahead and marked them on the fall chart as well so I won't plan on putting anything there.

My fall grids are red. This picture is only of the grid for the corner yard. The other two gardens are on the pages after this one. Today I planted all of the lettuce (romaine, black seeded simpson and iceberg), red and black radishes, rutabaga, beets, and carrots. I went ahead and splurged on the pelleted carrots. I'm a spoiled, happy girl that I did. The circles say 'Done' and the date things were planted.

I love it because I can take it with me to the park when the kids are playing or just in front of the television at night. It's perfect in pencil because I can change it at will.

I've got places in the bottom box that are Xed out. That's where the sweet potatoes are. They'll stay there for some time still. The okra in the top box is there for a while longer as well. There are two that aren't producing anymore that I'll most likely cut out this weekend, but the rest will stay a while longer. The broccoli and cabbage is another story. I wanted to put them one per square, but I honestly think staggering them is going to be better for them. The peppers will have to come out of the broccoli's space ready or not, but they've got several weeks before the transplants are ready.

Mornings are back to normal at the Ribbit house. We're off of our furlough tomorrow which means that we're up at 5:00 AM. I did go to school and organized my classroom, fetched 160 books (I'll have more kids than that, but 160 is good for a start), and hung things back on the wall and cleaned up glass from where my pictures fell off of the wall over the summer. We start back full force tomorrow. I suppose it will keep my mind off of waiting for the kohlrabi to germinate. 15-21 days!!! Seriously? That's ridiculous.

Sweet gardening dreams.