We had a very successful veggie gardening season in 2012, but there’s always room for improvement so I am making plans for a bigger and better garden in 2013. Winter is the perfect time to start planning for the upcoming gardening season, and the to do list is well underway. The project I’m most excited about is building a greenhouse. We have been collecting materials for about a year to repurpose into a greenhouse, and we’ve got quite a stockpile of old house windows, a set of french doors, corrugated plastic for roofing or walls, old cedar decking, and the parts from an old disassembled greenhouse. I’m currently sketching out the dimensions of the greenhouse and the floor plan to accommodate everything I think I’ll want to have room for in the greenhouse, although never having had a greenhouse before makes it a bit hard to know for certain what I’ll need. Right now I’m leaning toward a 10 x 14 foot greenhouse with planting beds and shelves along the south and east sides, a sink and potting bench on the west side, french doors on the north side, and a potting bench island in the middle. Now that I’ll have more space for seed starting, I am planning to do a better job of starting seeds next spring and I’m also planning to do more succession planting of salad greens, spinach, bok choy and kale. I also want to experiment with growing a few tomatoes in the greenhouse and see how late into the fall they will continue to ripen.
There’s an old garden bed in front of the house and below the driveway, close to where the greenhouse will go that looks like it used to be a nice little flower garden until it got invaded by blackberry after a few years of neglect. It gets full sun and would be the perfect spot for growing sprawling plants like squash and cucumbers. I’ve read that squash are fairly deer resistant since deer don’t like to eat their fuzzy leaves, so there’s no sense in growing those plants in our vegetable garden that is protected by the electric deer fence – I may as well save that garden space for growing plants that need to be protected from deer. I spent a bit of time last year pulling blackberry and planting a few flowering shrubs around the perimeter of the old garden bed, so this spring I will finish weeding it and try growing my squash there and maybe even a few pumpkins and gourds while I’m at it.
There are a few other items on the garden to do list, including putting up a bird scare to keep the birds from eating all the raspberries and blueberries like they did last year and building a wooden potato box to keep the soil mounded up around the potato plants. With 2013 right around the corner, I can already tell it’s going to be a busy year in the garden!
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