Planning the Summer Garden {2023}

This past year has been a wild ride…and I hope to fill y’all in on it. As a minimum I want to bring you along on our journey from now on & future adventures after so many farm customers and friends & family have asked for updates. So, here goes!

I’m going to keep you in the dark about the biggest change on the farm (I’m dying to share, but won’t share until it’s finished! 😍) but thought I’d write a little bit about our garden this year.

This garden space is right around 6,000 square feet. When we started prepping this space early 2022, we thought “this garden is HUGE!” But as we actually sat down this year with what we wanted to grow, and how much we needed to grow for this year’s canning goals, we might actually have to expand the garden space significantly in future seasons. 😅

I plan to have a future post soon to share what varieties we decided to grow, but this is a general layout for what we’re doing this year in the “row garden”.

We have a space on the backside for rows of corn. We’ll have 3 rows of trellises the whole width of the garden; one row for cucumbers, one row for green beans, and one row for dried beans. That’s a total of eighteen trellises. Along the farthest side, nestled behind the trellises will be a small area of bush beans- mainly to give the boys a garden chore dedicated to them. The side that is shared with the cottage garden will be a row of small & dwarf sunflowers. Nestled between the sunflowers & bush beans is a watermelon patch.

Across the entire middle of the garden, we’ll have rows & rows & rows of tomatoes, peppers and squash plants. Along the side closest to the house, we have a pumpkin/winter squash patch.

And yes, I mentioned an adjacent “cottage garden”. 😍 I’ll be sharing in detail what will be going in there & how we completely transformed the space from our small row garden into a gorgeous & useful cottage garden.