Finalized Plot Designs for Pea Pods

I've pretty much finalized the layouts for the two plots I am renting at the community garden this year.  Surprisingly, I ended up with even more space than I anticipated, especially after going through the entire long list of items that I was planting this year!  I truly thought I was going to run into space issues, but, nope!  I had more than enough space, and there are only a couple things I am growing here at the house, so that didn't even really save much space. 

I believe I've mentioned it before, but one thing I'm doing for sure is not inter-planting my sweet corn, and I'm going to be growing the spaghetti squash here at the house so that I can really let it go crazy- supposedly it is quite productive, so I'm hoping that turns out to be the case. 

Before I go into more detail, if you're wondering how I did these layouts, I made them in the spreadsheet program in LibreOffice, which is a pretty good free word processing suite.  You could use pretty much any spreadsheet program (Excel counts) to do this, or you could just draw it out in a graphics program or similar.  Or just do it on paper.  I prefer to have it done nicely with text and whatnot on the computer, but your mileage may vary.  Doing it this way also allows me to print it out in a small but readable fashion that I can put in my 5"x7" gardening journal. 

I like being able to put the layouts in my journal as well, because I can tape over them and then be able to use a vis-a-vis marker on them to mark them up and be able to wipe it off if I need to.  This of course means that if I leave the marks on, they come off on the opposite page, but that isn't a huge deal for me.  It is helpful when I need to mark up replants or things that I've already seeded.

The top layout is for the bed I"m going to be doing most of my "early" plantings, which I'll do halfway through April.  I'll be using a row cover on them to keep things from freezing too much.  You might notice that I've put most of the more cold tolerant things in that bed as well- I really hope that getting my peas in earlier this year will result in a better yield, because last year they never really got going, not even as a fall planting.  Judging from the nibble marks on the young shoots, I think that was in part because of the resident bunnies that hung out at the garden, but there were other people who had great luck with peas, so I'm really hoping for better turnout this time.  I'll be planting peas at the house as well.

Anyway, hopefully we'll be back to more scheduled posting next week.  This weekend I need to photograph some of my leftover seed packets from last year so I can do little write-ups like I did on the ones from this year.  I hope you guys enjoy that :)