Desktop gardening

Late last summer I once again did my best to sketch the layout of the vegetable garden and write in what might go where the next year.  The plan has to take into account how much of everything we want to eat, what likes to grow together, and a sensible succession from year to year, ie givers follow roots follow leaves follow heavy feeders, or something like that.  It was all on one sheet of letter-size paper, and was lost to me by the end of the year.  Before I realized it was lost, though, Garden Rant tipped me off that Kitchen Gardeners International (KGI) had introduced an online garden planner.  For the low price of $25 per year, I could draw the plan onto a grid and copy it from year to year, and trust that it could always be found safely on my hard drive (or in the cloud, which is fine).  That was enough to sell it to me.  I believe there is more to it that I haven't discovered yet; that's icing on the cake (or ice on caked soil in our case.)

I measured the garden beds one afternoon last week, quite hastily on account of the deeply cold air and colder steel tape measure and the near impossibility of conducting the measurements and notations while wearing mittens.  The grid measurements are only to the nearest 10cm anyway.  The beds in the image below are, to the best of my knowledge, to scale.  The placement doesn't look quite right.  Some are more rectangular in theory than in reality.  But this is a good approximation of what I have to work with in the backyard.  There are a few bits missing, bits for which I wasn't willing to risk frostbitten fingers.  Another day.


Once the beds were all laid out, I added images of huge, awesomely perfect vegetables to them (Barry found the lost sketch.)  Is this what Farmville is like?  The hugeness was a mild shock.  The vegetable plant images come with built in personal space for each one.  Regulation personal space.  Where it shows I can fit three tomato plants into a raised bed, I am more likely to try to cram in ten of them.  Is it possible the experts at KGI know better than I do?

The planner was also kind enough to count up all the plants in the plan and tell me how many of each I will need to implement this scheme.  Next step is to compare this listing to my extensive seed inventory to determine what needs to be ordered from the seed mongers.