Garden Plans

We close on our new house on Monday, and our home improvement plan-making is in full swing, including plans for our first real fruit & vegetable garden! Even though we've lived in apartments, the past few years we've maintained a few potted vegetables, but we are planning to step it up a few notches in our new place.

We've been talking about this garden for a long time now, and we are asking ourselves a few questions to decide what to plant.

1) What do we eat most often right now? Green beans, peppers, lettuce, spinach, onions, and basil.
2) What could we grow that will store well? Berries (jam!), tomatoes-onions-jalapenos-cilantro (salsa!), and potatoes.

Once we came up with our list of plants, we started our research on how much spacing/sunlight each will need as well as what plants grow well in the same bed. Then we mapped it all out and MS-Paint'd our plan so we could share it with all of you!

Tentatively, we are going to build two raised beds next to our driveway that are 20' x 4' each, with a 4' walkway in between. On the east end of the garden area, there is a partially shady spot near one of our trees (that's what the big ol' gray circle on the map is all about).

1 Potatoes	6 Kale	11 Jalapenos	16 Basil
2 Beans (Bush)	7 Lettuce	12 Strawberries	17 Cilantro
3 Asparagus	8 Spinach	13 Blackberries	18 Oregano
4 Tomatoes	9 Onions	14 Raspberries	19 Parsley
5 Cucumbers	10 Bell Peppers	15 Blueberries

We don't want to overdo it this first year and have half our garden go to waste, so we're probably not going to plant as much as we have in our plan. For example, we will probably only plant one row of green beans but leave some space in case we decide to do a few more rows for next year. Oh, and we've already missed the planting season for some of these, so those won't actually make an appearance until next year.

Also, have I mentioned that we've never done this before? I think we'll both be happy as long as our garden isn't an utter failure.