Ready to Awaken The Beast

Each year as I start to plan out my summer vegetable garden I start with such hopes and dreams and neat little rows of plants ready to be nurtured into a crop to feed us throughout the summer and yet by the end of summer I feel I'm battling against a wild gang of beasts all fighting for the same space.  Each year I set out to plant half as much and really give the plant the space they need and this year I hope to stick to my plan.  I've made careful notes about last years garden, the ups, the downs the things that thrived and the things that went wild.

I've started my new venture of potatoes outside the main garden in planting bags because I've heard they are invasive and will always keep coming back.  I am excited for the new adventure but at the same time glad they are isolated outside the garden leaving me more room to plant.

Here's the garden before shot, May 4th, still with the cover of fall leaves we piled on at the end of the season last year.  There are two herbs that wintered over in the garden, both of which we enjoyed during the winter and spring - rosemary and chives.  The leaves are almost broken down and will be great just raked into the soil.  Very few weeds, I love the natural covering leaves give the garden.

Here's the garden shopping list my helper McKenzie wrote up for me.  I did actually bring these with me to the nursery to buy my starts.  I did get a few looks but it was so worth it to have her helping me on this task.

After the trip to the nursery we raked in the leaves and added a bit more new soil and compost and then planted our crops in a very spaced out manner.  Here's our list for this year from left to right:
- Beans with tee-pee
- Zucchini
- Squash
- Pumpkins
- Peas (we added a climbing lattice for them soon after this picture)
- Lettuce
- Kale (my other new experiment for this year)
- Rosemary (existing)
- Chives (existing)
- Thyme
- Sage
- Tomatoes - five plants, 4 sun gold and one black cherry variety

You can also see the potato bags next to the garden.  They had small sprouts of green leaves forming at this point.  Very excited for this years garden to be started.

Close up of my tomato area, I tried very hard to give them enough space this year since last years crop seemed very overwhelming at the end and hard to harvest.  I added their red grow bags after this picture was taken to help them have a  warmer environment to start off in.