Planning the Squares

Before things actually go into the ground I wanted to spend a little time planning out which veggies go in which squares. There is the issue of bigger veggies (corn) shading smaller veggies, but I also don't want everything to come up at once, i.e. I don't need 40 ears of corn on June 20th. I want to stagger my plantings so I can have certain types of veggies ripening throughout the year.

I simply chose which veggies my wife and I like to eat. We are members of a local CSA farm, Johnson's Backyard Garden, which we are a huge fan of, except that they don't really discriminate in what they grow. There is a cool quality to it because you get exposed to new stuff and learn about how to cook it, but you end up getting really weird stuff, like kohlrabe, swiss chard, or more eggplant than you could ever eat for literally months in a row. So our planned crops are pretty normal. I've got 25 squares and 21 planned crops:

seeds...I haz em

• Sweet corn
• White corn
• Snowbird peas
• Greenbeans
• Buttercrunch lettuce
• Mesclun salad mix
• Spinach
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Cucumbers for pickling

I also have a bag of red potato slips and red onion slips, strawberries, as well as the peppers and tomatoes I am starting indoors:

• Cherry Tomatoes
• Roma Tomatoes
• Beefsteak Tomatoes
  
• Habanero Peppers
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Pepperoncini Peppers
  
• Bell Peppers
• Hungarian Wax Peppers
• Chile (Anaheim) Peppers

So here is a draft layout of the crops. The tallest crops are in the top right (the sun goes up the left side of this box):

I will likely swap out the late carrots with the pepperoncini peppers.

Early Starters

Before I get to the dirt, I've got something a little more interesting. I figure on roughly two waves of planting: late January and early March. I'll do the January plantings this weekend and post about it in a week and a half or so. However some of the veggies (the peppers and tomatoes) need to be started indoors and transplanted into the garden when they are a couple of months old, in March. As of right now, I am starting:

• Habanero pepper
• Jalapeno pepper
  
• Bell pepper
• An Anaheim-type pepper
• Hungarian wax pepper
• Pepperoncini pepper
  
• Roma Tomatoes
• Beefsteak Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes

I bought a simple Rubbermaid 24 x 12 shallow container to hold the trays. I planted the seeds in peat strips which will decompose when planted (50 individual pots in 10-pot trays). Each 5 pot strip held one type of plant, in Ladybug Seed Starter mix, which you can see labeled on the side of the container:

This is about 2 weeks after planting. All the tomatoes have sprouted, just now the peppers, especially the Habanero, are coming up.

I also bought a grow light rig (which I am quite happy with) so I can make sure the seedlings are getting the correct amount of light:

Pepperoncinis are in the regular pot

I try to give them about 10 hours of artificial, direct sunlight daily. I keep the soil fairly most with a spray bottle. Shortly after I took the above picture, I began to snip the seedlings so that only the strongest-looking one survives in each pot. Then I will choose the strongest looking plant of the 5 pot strip to put in the garden. I will give the weaklings to friends to plant. pwn3d.