The Garden Layout

SmartGardener is great for obsessive organizers!

For the most part, it looks like this will be my main garden plan.

So.  Many.  Plants. 

It is a little hard to see, but if you click it, you can open up the screenshot I took from my SmartGardener account.  To give you a sense of scale, each of the largest round spaces is a half wine barrel.


Each square represents one foot, and the SmartGardener system works similarly to Square Foot Gardening.  Each plant represents a varying number of plants, sometimes just one, sometimes 4, sometimes up to 16.  Then you have the big ones like those orange squash on the bottom left... that's 3 plants per 16 square feet.  Where you see overlapping plants like tomatoes/radishes, it means the radishes are planted first, then removed when the tomatoes get larger.

The garden doesn't look quite like that, I just mushed all the useable spaces together for ease of planning.  The empty brown spots get pretty much no sun due to tree cover and fences, so I am planning to just plant some random greens in there and see what happens.

All the funky-shaped (not rectangular, not circular) spaces are the new rock-walled raised beds that were put in last year.  The top middle stripe that is only a foot wide is the sturdy trellis and is also included in the "new raised bed" space.  It'll hold some vining things, so I'm taking those cucumbers a little out of their comfort zone according to the chart that says to put 3 plants in a 9 square foot area. 

All the sunflowers are along the western fence, so those 12-foot-tall behemoths won't be blocking any bright sunlight for the other plants, and they'll be facing our yard (when they get big, the flowers lock into an east-facing position).

There are some plants not placed in any particular soil.

The lakota squash down on the bottom left will not be in a bed... I am going to try just putting them in the ground over by the air conditioner.  Light and soil is less than optimal, but it's the only space I have to grow these squash since I will need an 8ftx4ft space for the vines.  Plus, winter squash is cheap, so I'm not going to waste prime tomato real estate on 'em.

It's hard to plan succession planting on this thing, but I will keep adding random garlic, radishes, turnips, and those teeny carrots to the garden wherever there is a spare spot.  Mmmm.

Is it realistic?

This is a very optimistic plan about what will actually sprout, survive and produce... and quite a bit more than what fits my goal of 456 pounds of produce in 432 square feet. 

If it worked perfectly, it would give us this many plants:

• 17 tomato
• 4 pepper
• 15 cucumber
• 10 summer squash
• 6 winter squash
• 320 leafy green
• 300+ radish
• 100+ turnip
• 135 beets
• 128 carrot
• 32 basil  (pesto for life!)
• 22 other herb
• 25 sunflower
• 16 other edible flower
• 2 plum, 1 apple
• plus 2 lemon, 1 buddha's hand, 1 pomegranate, 1 fig (none have produced yet)

That's 1138+ plants.  If half of 'em work, I'll be thrilled beyond measure.  Here's hoping everything grows!

What are your gardeny aspirations this year? How do you reign in the over-exuberance??