In previous diaries, we have discussed what to plant, when to plant and how much to plant. Today’s topic is where to plant. It’s time to pull out a pad of graph paper (or open a graphics program) and diagram what goes where.

In a row garden, it’s easy to figure out what goes where. Generally, the rows are laid out on an East/West axis and the tall plants go in the North and the short stuff goes in the South. It’s an orderly progression from corn to pole beans, tomato plants to bush beans, on down to onions and carrots in front. There’s a tidy linear logic to it but problems arise from always putting the same plants in the same rows year after year. Various grubs, nematodes, bacteria and fungi build up in the soil just waiting for their annual feast.  Also, different plants deplete or nourish the soil differently and start out needing different types of soil mixtures. Uniformly, tilling and fertilizing the whole garden bed to a 6.0-7.0 pH doesn’t take into account that potatoes, for instance, prefer acidic soil more in the 5.0-5.5 range. Rosemary wants a dry soil while lettuce wants its roots to stay moist.

The organic gardening solution is to put plants in beds, preferably deep and raised, group plants according to their affinities and rotate the beds annually. John Seymour uses four rotating beds:

Plot A for Miscellaneous plants like squash, tomatoes, peppers, and salad greens

Plot B for Root crops like carrots, celery, fennel, and onions

Plot C for Potatoes

Plot D for peas, beans and brassica (the “cabbage tribe” that includes Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, turnips and such).

To round out a self-sufficient garden, one would also have permanent beds for perennial vegetables like asparagus and globe artichokes, a bed for small fruits like raspberries and blueberries, a perennial herb bed and a small orchard if you have the land.

The rotation moves A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to A. Seymour has some sound reasons behind his scheme. Peas and Beans “fix” nitrogen in the soil, that is, they build up the soil’s natural ability to generate its own. Potatoes crave nitrogen so sending them in after the beans makes sense. The Miscellaneous plants deplete nitrogen so putting in the peas after them balances the soil without requiring too much added compost.

Eliot Coleman in The New Organic Grower has a much more complex rotation model that involves a ten year rotation. He goes from beans to carrots, onions to greens, potatoes to corn, peas to broccoli, squashes and cucumbers to tomatoes and peppers and on back to corn. He uses index cards to keep it all straight in his mind!

Mel Bartholomew of Square Foot Gardening fame makes it all so much simpler by saying you just don’t plant beans in the same place you just harvested beans because of seasonal limits. “The Blocks that held summer crops are the ones that will be ready for fall soil preparation and early planting next spring. Blocks that still hold fall crops won’t be ready for planting until next summer, so the same crops will not be planted in them.” He shuts the whole garden down during the winter with a crop of rye grass and tills it under in early spring.

Personally, I tend to combine Seymour’s groupings with Bartholomew’s patchwork approach because I always want more Miscellaneous goods than Roots and cabbages. If I devoted an entire bed to Roots I’d have more carrots and onions than I could ever use.  So it’s important for me to keep a record of what goes where, anticipate its harvest date and then decide what goes in after it. This brings me back to graph paper…

I used Corel Draw to lay out diagrams of my eight beds divided by a grid marked in six-inch squares. I shrunk this down to fit on a letter-sized sheet of paper. At the top of the page the “Time Period” is stated.  Referring to my Excel-generated Planting Schedule, I see that during the first period, from 2/7-2/16, I should be putting in onions, turnips, collards, and starting staggered plantings of spinach and peas.  Converting row yields to Bartholomew’s square foot plantings, I know how many square feet of each plant I need to supposedly produce the yield I want. For example, I figure 8 squares of onions planted 16 per square ought to give us enough onions to make it thru until the winter onion harvest early next spring.

Plot A will host the spinach seeds and will later be joined by lettuces. Plot B will get the onions at one end; carrots, shallots, garlic, and leeks will be added when their time comes. Plot C will get potato slips during the second planting period. And Plot D will be set up with mesh fencing to support the peas as they are planted. I’ve planned and printed out the ten sheets for the first hundred days of my growing season. After the Early potatoes are pulled, the tomato plants will go in after them.  After the peas are harvested, squashes and peppers will follow them. These ten sheets are now in a binder and will be scrawled all over when I’m done with the names of the varieties I use, the actual plant and harvest dates and any notes I make about the pests they attract and what I did to control them. This information will be vital when I sit down to plan next year.

Construction Update: Even with the use of heavy machinery, there was a lot of manual labor involved and we only dug six beds and got one truckload each of topsoil and manure. We partly framed three beds and have three more to go. The rain held off and by Monday morning we were two tired old people in extreme muscle pain. We’ll try to finish the framing in the evenings before the rains come again this weekend. Hubby is going to build a frame with hardware cloth to shift the topsoil and mix in manure before we add it to the framed beds. I don’t really need the last two beds until the end of March so we may do them manually if the weather allows.  Or, we may rent the digger for a half day and do both of them without hurting ourselves as much. It really depends on whether the rain lets up enough to dry out the soil…  And, we all know that come July, I’m going to be begging for rain. Gardeners are never satisfied with the weather.

Thru the weekend, as we worked, we discussed whether or not we really, truly have to cut down the pecan tree. It will block the morning sun but the afternoon sun, for at least five hours, shines on the beds. That will not be good enough. We also discussed the prevailing winds, which come from the southwest at 10-15mph and sometimes gust over 25mph. So the current decision is the pecan tree is coming down but we will replace it with a line of ten Leland Cypress along the southwestern corner of our property. These will break the wind but be far enough away from the garden to not be a shade problem for, oh, twenty or thirty years. We’ll be dead by then, of course.