Garden Plans for EMPTY BEDS!

I spent so much time researching the web for info on Ojai vegetable gardening - what to plant, when to plant, etc.  I found a great source of info on http://www.gardening-coaches.com/whentoplantveggies.php which helped a lot, and led me to three seed catalogs:  Seeds of Change, Renee's Seeds, and Seeds of Italy, as well as some growveg.com software to help me lay out the beds.  Armed with those three catalogs PLUS Territorial Seed AND Burpee AND Harris Seed AND White Flower Farm (a friend gave me a $200 gift certificate - THANK YOU LORETTA!), I weighed and guessed and had so much fun picking my seeds!  I think you will see that I chose many things for the color - fun picks like: red scallions, purple carrots, red corn, yellow watermelon, rainbow chard... there is so much irony - picking beets and tomatoes and watermellons that are yellow while picking corn and carrots that are red!

Here is what is on order so far - this will keep me busy!:

Tomatoes

•  Black Krim (Russia heirloom)
• Sweet Persimmin (orange flesh heirloom)
• Costoluto heirloom
• Marmande (North Italian/French fav heirloom)
• Chocolate Cherry
• Razzleberry (gift, I don't know that I would have found this one)
• Cherokee Purple Organic heirloom
• Pineapple heirloom
• Yellow Pear Heirloom  (I had tremendous luck with these last year)
• Red and Yellow Pear Mix 
• Red Lightening Hybrid 
• Japanese Trifele Black Tomato (looks like an interesting unique one)
• Brandywine Heirloom

Corn

• Casino
• Mirai Collection (yellow, white, yellow&white) 
• Maple Sugar Hybrid
• Ruby Red Queen Hybrid (red edible corn!)

Beets

• Jewel-Toned blend (has Red Sangria, Golden and candy-striped Chioggia beets )
• Touchstone Gold Hybrid 
• Detroit Dark Red

Asparagus (nervous about these, have not done these before, worried they will take over beds!)

• Purple passion
• Jersey Giant

Carrots

• Purple Haze Hybrid (purple!  Need I say more?)
• Tendersnax Hybrid 
• Purple Dragon
• Red Cored Chantenay 

Peppers

• Giallo di Cuneo (Yellow pepper from Cuneo) 
• Flavorburst hybrid
• Sweet Rainbow Mix (every color purple, red, yellow, green, orange)

Radishes

• Watermelon (white with pinkish-purple inside)
• Confetti Blend

Pea/Sugar Snap Peas (had great luck with these last year too)

• Super Sugar Snap
• Super Sugar Snap V.P.
• Sugar Pod II

Onions

• Red Delicious hybrid (first time I am doing onions, they might protect the other plants from pests so useful AND edible!)

Scallions

• Tokyo Long White Bunch
• Red Beard 

Leeks

• Broad London
• Titan
• Electra

Basil

• Genovese

Kale

• Lacinato
• Dinosaur
• Red Russian

Chard

•  Bright Lights (from two different sources to compare performance)

Spinach

• Whale 
• Olympia
• Bordeaux (has red stems)
• Taste of Asia 

Other Greens:

• Sputnik Arugula
• Komatsuna
• Maruba Santoh
• Mizuna
• Tatsoi

Eggplants

• Asian Bride
• Little Fingers
• Farmer's Long
• Fairy Tale
• Burpee Hybrid (big dark one)

Zuccini

• Striato d'Italia - Italian Stripe

Broccoli

• Barbados Hybrid 

Cauliflower

• Brocoverde

Brussel Sprouts

• Diablo Hybrid
• Falstaff (red purply ones!)

Watermelon

• Yellow Doll
• Tiger Baby
• New Orchid

Sunflowers

• Sunfower Heaven
• Organic Mammoth Sunflower

I also am planting Marigolds for pest control and a Butterfly/Hummingbird/ecology attractant/enhancement seed collection.

I am planting all these using seed starter kits.  Last year I used the Jiffy kits - the seeds mostly BUT they ran into the plastic lid ciling far too soon, so I had to prop things up, very awkward and hurt the greenhouse impact of the setup.  This year I am trying Park Seed's Double Bio Dome with 80 JUMBO cells; this setup has somewhat taller plastic lids and comes with seed starter food, which I think sounds beneficial, time will tell! 

In addition, throughout the rest of the garden will be our fruit trees, more on that in a future post. 

So where to plant all these things?  Using the demo of http://www.growveg.com/ garden planning software AND armed with a copy of Edward Smith's "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible" (the software takes into account crop rotation from season to season but NOT "companion" planting - things like tomatoes like carrots but not pole beans), I created the tentative garden plan below... This will keep me busy!

Another nice thing about the growveg.com software - it will tell you WHEN to generally plant indoors/outdoors and harvest what you put in your plan, based on your zip code :)  When my seed packets arrive, I will compare what the software produces to what the seed packets say.  Also nice, I understand that I will get reminder emails from growveg.com - I haven't experienced that yet because I just signed up for the trial and finished my plan. 

Garden Plans for EMPTY BEDS!

About the Artist Family Garden..Pets...and Cooking Fiascos!


Here are last year's vegetable beds...

Mr. Squirrel, do you have reservations?

With last year's harvest, I tried more carrot recipes than one would think possible - carrot breads, carrot muffins, carrot quiche, carrot souffle, carrot juice - even carrot and lentil curry! I did not make ANY corn dishes, solely because the gopher got to eat ALL THE CORN! I did steal one premature ear of corn just as he was pulling it down the hole! The horseshoe shown below is the horseshoe we found in the garden - apparently it was lucky for the gopher!

-And here are the beds as they exist today - including two new raised beds! The large green plants you see are celery, waiting to be harvested - YUM! Such fun, such anticipation :)

There will be grapes and corn in the narrow bed closest to us; cheery sunflowers in the backside of the longest bed with all sorts of peppers, carrots, spinach, kale, swiss chard, and tomotoes in the long bed (still choosing tomato varieties - I better hurry!); the continuation of celery and artichoke, as well as zuccini, eggplant, and a few other things in the middle bed; and at the bed at the far end will be berries, berries and more berries - blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries! YUM!

Lest you think we are only planting veggies and berries, we have some young fruit trees too, for which we have big dreams:

The above is a loquat tree we planted from seed. It should bear fruit by the time I'm 80!

Here is photo of one of our young trees we planted our big Leonberger decided it was a chewtoy, so that was the end of that - but we keep it in the ground, just in case it revives....

So now we keep our trees in cages, to protect them!

-and our most unusal crop :)