December brings us to the end of another year. As a gardener you know that just because the calendar year may be ending our work (fun) is just beginning. It’s time to plan your 2019 Vegetable Garden. To me planning is the fun part. During the planning process I get to look for new varieties of seeds to try, think of new layouts for the garden, evaluate what did and didn’t work in 2018 (or previous years), and apply all that to a garden plan for the upcoming gardening season.
Garden Plan Simplification
My vegetable garden plan for 2019 has one theme to it – SIMPLIFICATION. Simplifying the garden and making it less complicated is my main goal. The busier I get with work and family the more difficult it becomes to effective manage my garden. Unfortunately I haven’t mastered the art of freezing time to get extra work done nor have I been able to clone myself. Time stops for no one so it’s up to us to manage it effectively. Sometimes that means being realistic with how much time you really have.
The simplified garden plan for me is really just going back to my roots. Raised beds.
Raised Beds
Raised beds are one of the best ways to manage a garden. You can make raised beds into just about any layout that you can shape the materials into. You can build raised beds as high as you want and you can fill them with the best soil you can find.
The raised beds I built in the past are all gone at this point. They were made of unpressure treated pine which eventually decays.
Even though the eventually decay I still love their versatility.
For 2019 my garden plan is essentially to build 4 4ft x 4ft raised beds and limit my production to those beds. That is extremely hard for me to do. I’m the kind of gardener who looks in a seed book and sees all the many different varieties of tomatoes and wants to try them all. And I also want to keep my favorites growing every year.
Here’s a break down of the Garden Plan for 2018. It is still a work in progress and subject to change. This is essentially a summer vegetable garden plan. Once I have the summer garden plan together I can work backwards to plan for the early spring garden.
Bed 1 The Tomato Garden
In a 4ft x 4ft bed I can effectively grow 4 tomato plants. Underneath the tomatoes I can under plant a few basil plants. For that bed here is what I will have to plant:
- Woodle Orange Tomato – Great flavor, resistant to cracking, orange slicing tomato. Heirloom
- Cherokee Purple – Dark red slicing tomato with great flavor. Heirloom.
- Genovese basil – Common Italian basil great for pesto and cooking
- Cinnamon basil – Basil with a cinnamon flavor to it. I use it in pesto too.
That leaves me 2 tomato variety spots to try. One will be a cherry variety of some kind and the other may be something new. Limiting myself to 4 tomato plants this year is going to be hard. I used to grow 30+ varieties in the garden!
Bed 2 – Peppers
I love having peppers around. The kitchen is almost always stocked with a couple bell peppers but I also like to grow a couple hot varieties. In total I think I can grow 7-8 plants in a 4ft by 4ft raised bed.
- Orange Bell Pepper x 2 – it is exactly what it says it is, an orange bell pepper!
- Quadratto d’Asti Rosso – red block style bell pepper.
- Corno de Toro – A horn shaped sweet pepper.
- Jalapeno – not sure yet which varieties I’ll plant but I’ll do 2 plants.
- 2 more pepper plants probably a cayenne and a habenero
At the end of each season I like to dry the leftover peppers and grind them into a chili powder for later. I do have to caution you if your peppers are hotter than habeneros (like the Ghost) be very careful. Those peppers can burn!
Bed 3 – Beans
Beans are easy to grow. The more you pick them the more you get with the vine varieties. If you plant bush beans you get a large crop all at once then can replace it with a successive crop afterward. As a legume, beans fix nitrogen into the soil as they decay which means a good crop to follow up with would be greens.
I’m not 100% sure of which varieties to do yet but I want to trellis a vine type bean or pea in the middle of the bed which the edges would be bush beans planted 1 week apart. By planting the beans 1 week apart I can make sure that I’m getting a steady flow of beans throughout the summer.
Bed 4 – Cucumbers and squash
Last year my Japanese long cucumbers were delicious. The Japanese long cucumbers made some great refrigerator pickles that were devoured by our family. We also need to have yellow squash and a Romanseco zucchini that is the best testing zucchini I’ve ever run across.
The squash and zucchini are susceptible to the vine borers so I’ll be trying to cover them this year and limit access to that pest. The cucumber will need trellised up.
That’s the start of next year’s vegetable garden plan. Using 4 beds like this is a good way to create a crop rotation plan. I think I would need to add another bed to that property as tomatoes and peppers are in the same family. With seed inventory I have now I could easily fill out the garden without buying more seeds this year, but what would be the fun in that?
For More on Raised Bed Gardening:
If you’re new to raised bed gardens please read this post I wrote on 11 things to think about when designing a raised bed garden layout. It may give you some ideas on how to plan your vegetable garden effectively.