Rethinking the Garden

I'm a firm believer in garden plans. I've even taught a workshop on how to make a garden plan, and preached the mantra "Make a plan and stick to it. Your premeditated ideas and decisions will almost always be better than your emotional, in-the-moment ones." Hopefully, if you were in that workshop, you weren't listening to that line of bull. Apparently, even I wasn't.

You see, my garden plan is out the window.

The problem began with one innocent tray of lettuce seedlings. This past winter, I was slowly accumulating some equipment necessary to eventually set up an indoor aquaponics ecosystem, and I was testing the grow lights that I had put together, using some leaf lettuce seeds as guinea pigs. They sprouted, but quickly yellowed and just weren't thriving. Because growing plants are a vital link the aquaponics chain, I tinkered around for better results: I changed the grow lights, and made my own potting soil. As a test bed, I scattered a bunch of mixed lettuce seeds in two inches of soil inside an aluminum roasting pan and waited to see what would happen.

Well, they sprouted. All of them. I was happy because my growing setup was working. And then the seedlings were 2-3 inches tall and crowding each other badly. I should have tossed them out; it was only an experiment, right? Of course, I couldn't do that. Instead, I transplanted 18 of them into individual peat pots. And then gave a half-dozen away to one friend, another dozen to a second friend. And then I transplanted another dozen for myself, and still I had more. Did I mention I scattered a bunch of seeds?

So, in March after I built my cold frame, I moved my growing little collection of seedlings outside. Then, once the beds were ready--and the drip irrigation installed--it was just too tempting to wait. I planted my lettuce seedlings where I'd planned to, but also right across the beds that I'd planned for spinach and carrots.

The non-plan problem deepened when my strawberries didn't come up the way I'd hoped, and I moved them to the new rain gutter planters and put broccoli in their place (therefore not putting the broccoli in the bed space I'd planned it to go). Then, after reading Four Season Harvest, Melissa and I have decided to put up a convertible greenhouse over our main garden, which requires space around the edges.

So today, I fully converted the tiered strawberry bed into a fully-enclosed raised bed for the broccoli, and I made a footpath on the west side of spinach, lettuce, and onion beds, even transplanting some plants to do it. It looks great, and it will improve both the look and the usability of the garden.

But now my garden looks almost nothing like the design I crafted last winter, and my plan bears little resemblance to the growing reality behind our house.

Oh well, even architects have their initial blueprints (the way they imagine it) and their as-built drawings (the way the building was actually built). Maybe next year my plan will be better...