Our Garden Plans
I am sooo excited to share our garden plans with you today! We moved into our house last July so last summer and fall we didn’t do much with the garden beds, we wanted to see what the previous owner had planted and how the gardens looked over the summer. This year, we’ve been dreaming and scheming all the fun things we can do with our yard, garden, and outdoor space! To be honest, with this never-ending pandemic, it’s fun to be able to look forward to something, even if that something is just flowers blooming and harvesting our own veggies and fruit! I mean, having a big garden and growing our own food has always been a dream of mine, so I’m really excited!
Veggie Gardens
Okay, let’s start with our veggie garden plans. If you follow along on Instagram, you’ll have seen that we ripped out one of three decks that we have off the back of our house. We took out this deck after we had an arborist come by and look at all our trees. He mentioned that for the health of one of our Locust trees, we should take the deck out. It was built around the tree and the opening didn’t have enough room for the roots or trunk to keep growing and expanding. So, we took out that deck, saving all the decking lumber and decking screws to re-purpose. We ended up using all the decking boards and screws to make our own raised beds. I reckon we saved several hundred dollars on wood, which is amazing! We made four raised beds, three beds are 7 feet long by 3 feet wide and the other two beds are 5 feet long by 3 feet wide.
These raised beds are what we’re planning on using for our veggies. We have foxes where we live in the county, and we are hoping that by raising the veggies off the ground, we can prevent some of the animals from being too interested in them. If we need to we’ll add some frames with chicken wire and make simple doors to prevent animals from getting into our veggies.
We’re starting all our veggies from seed, we’re using West Coast Seeds and by we, I really mean Topher, haha! Some of the veggies I’m so excited to plant are:
Greens like arugula, mixed greens, kale, spinach, and different lettuces
Zucchini and eggplant
Cabbage and Brussel Sprouts
Radishes and cucumbers
Broccoli and broccolini
Cauliflower
Tomatoes and various types of peppers
Carrots and peas
Two very important lessons we learned about gardening:
1. Companion Planting
Companion planting is simply planting plants that work together. This helps use your garden space more efficiently and companion plants help each other grow stronger and healthier! It’s important when you are about to plant something to research what its companion plants are and also to figure out what it doesn’t like to be planted with. This simple step can really affect the growth and success of your vegetables and plants.
Some examples of companion plants are:
Cucumber likes being planted with peas, lettuce, and celery. Cucumber does not like being planted with cauliflower, potatoes, basil.
Peppers like being planted with tomatoes, parsley, basil, carrots. Peppers do not like being planted with fennel.
Radish likes being planted with beets, carrots, peas, spinach, beans. Radish does not like being planted with cauliflower and Brussel Sprouts
2. Succession Planting
This is really important for vegetables like carrots, radish, and onions because once you pick these vegetables, they do not regrow. If you don’t sew your seeds all at once and instead sew them one to two weeks apart, your produce will come up in batches instead of having 10 pounds of carrots all at once.
Flower Beds
By now, I don’t think it’s any surprise that I’m so excited to have beds of flowers blooming. I’m looking forward to hitting up our local garden centres and nurseries and getting lots of flowers and flowering bushes into our gardens. We have four flower beds dug into our backyard as well as various beds around the house, so there is lots of room to play and experiment with different flowers, bushes, and plants!
We are trying to do about 70% perennials and 30% annuals. This ratio will keep maintenance a little bit lower and will also keep costs down a bit over time. Some of the flowering bushes we’re excited about are hydrangeas and butterfly bushes. We currently have peonies coming up that were planted by the previous owner (how lucky are we!) and we planted lots of tulip bulbs in the fall, so those are coming up as well as grape hyacinth. I’m excited to transplant our foxglove seedlings and sow some poppy seeds, not to mention all the dahlia bulbs we order in the winter!
I do like keeping gardens to a few key colours, so we’re really aiming for mostly pinks, whites, and greens with some bright yellow pops and a bit of purple here and there. This is really just the preliminary plan and as Spring continues our plans will absolutely change and evolve!
