Bow Down to the Awesomeness of my Chart

Every morning I ask Zeke if he wants to go to the library story time today; or to our mindful mama's meeting; or to preschool co-op, or what-have-you. And every morning for a week now he has said no. "I want to stay hooooome and eat yoooogurt." was his exact answer today.

And so home, for the most part, we have stayed.

It's difficult at times to remember that he is a person too, with plans for his day and moods. And both kids have seemed extra tired lately, not really wanting to do much. I try to respect their desires on how our day should go when I can, because very often I can't. We WILL go to Costco this afternoon, for example. But I'll admit, I am also getting very tired of staying home. I haven't been anywhere since church on Sunday. Pretty soon we will have to switch from respecting their needs to respecting mine.

In the meantime, I will show you what I've been doing these past home-bound days. You know, other than changing diapers and cleaning the fridge and playing hide and seek.

Is there anything more satisfying then a chart?

From left to right, or north to south as it were...

Bed 1
1 Squash hill (probably butternut)
2 Zuchinni hills

Bed 2
3x2 square feet of Carrots (probably 40-50)
2 Tomatoes (Jet Stars if we can find starts)
2 Cherry Tomatoes

Beds 3 and 4
2 rows of Green Beans (10 each) growing up
1 row of Corn (5 each)

Bed 5
2 double sided Pea trellis' (15 peas per side)
with Spinach in the shade between (7 successively planted)

Bed 6
Zeke's Strawberry Patch


The brown lines between each Bed represent my walkways. I'm going to dig them into 8 inch deep trenches for trench composting, and fill them as we go. Last year I used the end of the garden (what is now a squash bed) as a compost pile but it didn't really work out for me. Composting is apparently beyond my skill. Seriously, its not just letting stuff rot...there is an art to it. Trench composting seems much less an art and more like dumping garbage in a hole. That I can do.

It also makes me feel way less guilty about all those waste-of-space walkways. My garden is deep enough (a little over 6 feet) that I need them if I ever hope to reach the back but they still grate my nerves.

Anyways, if it works out for me I will just move the walkways every year and soon have a nice layer of compost over the whole garden, 8 inches deep.

You may also have noticed all those little flowers. They are Marigolds, Calendula's, and Cosmo's. All picked for their qualities to fend off slugs and dogs, attract pollinators, and feed nasty bugs that would otherwise eat my veggies. They are my guard-flowers, if you will.

Below you can see our Potatoes will be growing in a trash can. The raspberry bush that I want (and Josh needs to remove a different bush to make room for) is also represented, even though I doubt we will get around to it in time. It would need to be planted in March. And then there is Zeke's sunflower house that I'm hoping to put in his digging area. If I can keep him from digging them up.

I also made an at-a-glance chart with all of my amounts to plant alongside the various planting dates, and another more in detail month-by-month To Do list, including planting garlic (and also something else...I don't want 6x25 feet of garlic) in the fall as a winter crop to enrich the soil.

Now I just have to wait a few months to start....

In all honesty I'm glad I did it all, though. I looked at the calender the other day to check the dates for Easter and remembered that we have a really really late Easter this year (April 24th). So late in fact that almost my entire usual-garden-planning time will be smack in the middle of Lent, which would have left me little time to read all the gardening books and blogs I have been. So late even that the bunny wont be able to give the boys all the garden seeds, as the spinach, peas, potatoes, marigolds and maybe even the carrots will be in the ground by then.

Oh well, they can get the sunflower seeds ;)