Our Spring 2014 Garden

Happy Monday Friends! I can not tell you how happy I will be when spring finally arrives. Everything will wake up and bloom, windows will be flung open to let in the fresh breeze, cleaning and organizing will grace our schedules and kids can spend hours exploring yards and playgrounds. Sounds nice!

With the entrance of spring underway, my garden has been on my mind a lot lately. A couple of weeks ago I started the planning process of my spring garden. I am growing from seed then transplanting into my raised garden bed I built last summer. Narrowing down what I actually want to grow was a bit challenging. I want to start small and only grow vegetables and herbs we actually eat regularly.

Our Spring Vegetable | Herb Garden List

Basil Italian Large Leaf | Broccoli Di Cicco | Carrot Little Fingers | Kale Vates | Lettuce Buttercrunch | Marigold Crackerjack Mix | Bell Pepper Yolo Wonder | Rosemary | Spinach Bloomsdale | Thyme | Tomato Homestead

There are an abundance of things to also consider besides what to grow in your garden. One important question that gets asked time and time again is when to start planting. Researching each plant and figuring out when the danger of frost has past can be a daunting task, until I came across this great resource by Mother Earth News. Type in your zip code and bam it gives you a planting window for more than 20 common crops specific to your area.

This website also has a tool to plan the layout of your vegetable garden. Many of us use online software to plan a room in our house and this is the same but for your garden. You can experiment with your garden bed design and plant placement, find out frost dates, get a personalized planting chart, plan succession sowings and crop rotations.

It was a cinch to use and if you get stuck they have some handy videos that talk you through the steps. I love that you can switch from row planting to the square foot planting method. The site will suggest how many of each plant you should plant per square. That came in handy as I am using the square foot method.

Our Garden Plan

Things I tried to take into consideration when planning our layout was height and comparison planting. I am a beginner gardener and by no means a expert. In addition to my veggies and herbs I wanted to plant marigolds to help organically repel garden pest.

Our Planting Schedule

The blue line represents when I can start seeds indoors, the green line when I can transplant or direct sow into the garden, and the orange line is the expected harvest period. Handy little spreadsheet.

And if that is not enough, they email you a newsletter that has reminders set from your plan. I just got mine that informed me that I could start sowing indoors in the next two weeks for my broccoli, kale, lettuce, marigold, pepper, spinach, and tomato plants. Awesome!

Do you have plans for a garden this spring? Do you use a planning software? What type of herbs, vegetables, fruit trees, or flowers are you going to include? Spring is in the air! See ya soon!