The garden plan

It's never too early to start planning your garden. Gather 'round some gardening books and study up! In today's busy world it's easy to leave your garden planning to the last minute, but we have found that when we spend more time planning, we have better results. If you are working with a limited garden space, effective planning will ensure that you get the most food, beauty and joy from your efforts. One book we found that has been extremely helpful to us in our planning is McGee and Stuckey's The Bountiful Container.
This is a pretty popular book, easily found at a bookstore or online. It contains all kinds of great information on garden planning, like how to get started, how to combine different vegetables, herbs, fruits and flowers in to attractive container arrangements, and best of all, the book lists detailed information on how to start, care for, and harvest all the most popular garden plants. If you can only afford one book about container gardening, this is a good one!

We learned that container gardening could be a lot better than just sticking a tomato plant in a pot... you can combine more than one plant in each container to increase the variety, yield and beauty of your garden! Genius! Once we got past the old one-plant-per-pot idea, we started researching the best ways to combine our plants... this is when we got into the theories of companion planting. The idea is that some plants grow well in close proximity to other plants, and perform poorly next to certain others. The classic example was practiced by native Americans and is called The Three Sisters: planting beans, corn and squash in the same bed. The corn provides support to the beans and squash, the beans add nitrogen to the soil to feed the squash and corn, so they all do well. Some plants may offer pest control benefits to others, like planting stinky marigolds or fragrant dill around your tomatoes. The marigolds are so stinky, pests won't go near them, and the dill is so attractive, pests prefer eating the dill to eating your tomatoes. Radishes are good companions for most anything, loosening the soil for the surrounding plants' roots. There's a lot of great information out there, just do a google search on companion planting to learn all about it. Or you can take the easy way out and copy the Baby Bee Garden's combinations! We've spent countless hours researching to come up with our particular container combos, just be forewarned: this is all an experiment! We can't say for sure how things will turn out, because for the most part, we're trying everything for the first time! Maybe our plans are a bit ambitious for beginners... We've planned for at least 18 different vegetables, about 5 different herbs, several kinds of flowers and at least one fruit. All in all, our container garden will use more than 20 pots! There is a stone pathway in our yard going from the curb to our front steps and that's the home of the Baby Bee Garden. We figured placing the pots over the stone path would minimize the amount of our landlord's grass that gets killed. There will be seven, 24 inch diameter pots staggered in two rows to make up the heart of the garden. Those will be surrounded by seven, 18 inch diameter pots and seven or more small 10 or 12 inch diameter pots. The whole garden takes up an area of about 10 feet by 6 feet in the front yard! Yes, our neighbors do think we're freaks, but we don't care! At least we decided to do it in a classier way than last year, by buying huge garden planters rather than using ugly 5 gallon buckets! Those 24 inch planters are about $30 each... ouch! But we figure we'll use them for several years in a row, so next year we won't have to spend that money. Since we have our garden plan ready so early, we're able to spread out the expense of buying the containers by picking up a few every weekend instead of having to buy them all at one time, because we know we'll be starting with a few pots first, then adding more pots as the season progresses.
Here's a cute little sketch of the Baby Bee Garden!

Wow! It took a lot of time and planning to get this far! All the pots are numbered and labeled with the date the container will go in the yard, its size and its contents. Here's a detailed list of the garden plan:

• Pot 1, February 26, 24 inches: Bloomsdale spinach, Oregon sugar pod peas, and pansies
• Pot 2, February 26, 24 inches:  calabrese broccoli, Detroit dark red beets, evergreen bunching green onions and green garlic
• Pot 3, March 2, large bowl shaped planter: mesclun lettuce mix and cherry belle radishes
• Pot 4, March 2, 18 inches: red Russian kale, evergreen bunching green onions, and green garlic
• Pot 5, March 2, 12 inches: dill bouquet
• Pot 6, March 11, 18 inches: Danvers carrots, ruby red swiss chard
• Pot 7, March 23, 12 inches: cilantro
• Pot 8, March 23, 12 inches: pansies
• Pot 9, March 23, 12 inches: parsley
• Pot 10, April 1, 24 inches: roma tomatoes, lemondrop marigolds, and sweet basil
• Pot 11, April 1, 24 inches: dark green zucchini, pinkeye purple hull cowpea, and jewel nasturtiums
• Pot 12, April 1, 12 inches: sweet basil
• Pot 13, April 1, 12 inches: lemondrop marigolds
• Pot 14, April 1, 12 inches: catnip
• Pot 15, April 1, 12 inches: dill
• Pot 16, April 29, 18 inches: long purple eggplants and sweet basil
• Pot 17, April 29, 18 inches: California wonder bell pepper and jewel nasturtuims
• Pot 18, April 29, 18 inches: early jalepeno peppers and cilantro
• Pot 19, April 29, 24 inches: straight eight cucumbers and junior sunflowers
• Pot 20, April 29, 24 inches: Waltham butternut squash and lemondrop marigolds
• Pot 21, April 29, 24 inches: hearts of gold cantaloupe and jewel nasturtiums
• May add extra pots for our alpine strawberries, morning glories, or any plants we decide to add on impulse

Like we said... ambitious! That's just how we roll, here at the Baby Bee Garden! Now that the planning is all done, its time to get started...