Are you planning out your Spring garden already? If not- you are late! Get to it!! I finally am putting pen to paper and deciding what I want in each of my raised beds.
Resources I used:
#1 – Find your zone! This reference helps you determine the times of year you should be growing what for your specific zone. (click on “View our planting calendar for your area” to get to the next resource)
#2 – What is growing – From the National Gardening Association’s calendar from your area you can determine what you should be growing and when you should be starting it!
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What are we growing?
So here is what I am thinking. Our garden still has all of our winter vegetables growing in it (which actually all grow in the spring & summer here in zone 9b where we really only have 1 season). For all of our gardens up until now, I haven’t really used what we harvested for our food. It’s all been for the dogs (we make their food). So this time I picked foods that I love.
We already have Broccoli, Cauliflower, Collard Greens, Kale, and Cabbage growing.
I am looking to add: Zucchini / Squash, Brussel Sprouts, Corn, Lettuce, Cucumber, garlic, onion and Spinach. I have mapped it out below for our 4 raised garden beds.
{note: I use Silhouette Studio for all my crafting and this program makes it easy to throw together these types of images so that is what I used}
Mixing flowers into the vegetable garden:
As you can see in the graphic above, the outside of the garden boxes are lined with Marigold flowers. During our first go around we noticed we had issues with green caterpillars and slugs. They were driving Derrick crazy and they did a good amount of damage to our leafy plants such as our first round of zucchini which failed miserably.
I read more about the benefits of using flowers to naturally deter the pests and found, “The marigolds will help these veggies deter beetles, slugs leaf hoppers, bean beetles and the dreaded horn worms. The strong scent of marigolds may be the reason they are such amazing helpers in the garden. Their scent masks the scent of your vegetables so garden pests and predators are not attracted there.”
I can’t wait to provide an update once we have it all planted! What are you planting in your garden this year?
