Beginning Garden Planning

It's been a very busy week and other than a short trip to Ferndale Market yesterday I haven't done much but work and take a short trip to the gym. In the name of blogging more, this is more of a think piece.

I really want a garden, I have for a while. I'm still not sure if this is feasible for next summer. First, I am renting a house right now, so I'm limited to off the ground raised beds or pots/hanging bags. There is a method that has become popular as of late called square foot gardening that I think would be ideal for me, or anyone wanted a garden on a more manageable scale. Read about it here.

Below is a photo of a simple layout that may work nicely. I don't want to be overwhelmed the first year. My only concerns are that I do want to include some root crops and that would mean the bed would need to be quite deep. I would also re-emphasize that the bed is not simply raised, but needs to actually be off the ground. That's a lot of dirt and a lot of weight to have up in the air. We will see. The photo below is a 4x6 bed that I really like. They have an ingenious idea for adding depth for plants that need when others don't. I really like the trellis in the back for climbing beans.


I also found instructions to building a 4x4 bed similar to the one above here. A nice addition is that they included directions for raising the whole thing off the ground. The idea is that the bed is made in foot by foot grid, the length can be as long as you want, but depth is only 4 feet so you can always reach the center plants from outside of the bed. Seeds are then spaced by recommended width and depth to avoid wasted space between rows.

I am most interested in heirloom plants. Heirloom gardens are becoming more and more popular due a a mix of nostalgia, seed right advocacy, and concerns for loss of biodiversity in the food supply. All are legitimate reasons to want to grow heirlooms and I may even include some think pieces in the future on these topics. Really, for me, I think it is about nastalgia. Many heirlooms have an old world wabisabi that you just don't see anymore. They are like a growing antique store and can be very charming.

Still, you can't just walk into Walmart (God forbid) and pick up a pack of any heirloom you want. Sure, a few popular types have made it on to the mass market, but doesn't selling one more type of tomato in bulk quantities defeat a lot of the reasons for growing heirlooms in the first place? Part of the fun of heirlooms is trying the rare, the weird, the forgotten. I picked up a copy of a magazine called Heirloom Gardener which listed several heirloom seed companies. The list is a bit overwhelming, some companies offering a few varieties, some offering thousands of different seeds. At first I purused the list trying to determine the "best" company with the greatest selection, but in the end I reminded myself the philosophy that began this blog: sometimes simpler is better. So I narrowed it down to the closest company listed in Iowa: Seed Savers Exchange.

Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit founded in 1975 organized by members. One neat thing is they produce an annual yearbook of their members in which members will offer seeds they have saved themselves to other members. They don't have the staggering variety of some companies, but they are more likely to carry seeds better fitted to the northern climate and they won't have to travel quite so far to get to me.
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