NH Garden 2009
28 March 2009
Well, it's that time of year again and we're starting to plan our NH garden. According to the local nursery, our last expected frost date is May 30th, which is nice and easy for me to remember since it's the day before Missy's birthday.
This year will be a little different from prior years. We didn't do a garden last year since we thought we were moving to North Carolina. Prior garden layout was 3 4'x8' beds, 1 5'x10' bed, and two skinny flower beds, about 2'x4'. While I did till up the awful soil and enrich it before, last year it was fallow and I never really was able to get the raised beds that I wanted.
This years tentative early plan is the put in the raised beds with 1x10 or 1x12 frames around the beds and get a truckload of loam delivered. We're also looking to add some compost bins and a compost maker (aka rabbit).
As far as what we're actually growing, I placed an order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds 14 March, and the delivery got here in just a few days. I found them as a recommended seed company online, and so far my experience has been good, we'll see how good the crop is. By the way, I chose "Heirloom" seeds so that I could keep seeds after this harvest and re-use them. Regular seeds you get from Wal-Mart or someplace like that are usually hybrid, and they don't grow true to type if you save seeds.
I ordered Broccoli, 2 varieties of Carrots, Cauliflower, 2 varieties of Cucumbers, Eggplant, Peas, Lettuce, Onions, Sweet Pepper, Rhubarb, Spinach, and Tomato. I had ordered a Sweet Corn and another variety of Tomato, but they were out of stock on those. They were nice enough to kick in another type of Sweet Pepper for free and staple a $5 bill to my receipt for the refund on the two out of stock items.
Rhubarb and Onions aren't recommended for people to start from seed, but I'm going to try and have a totally natural setup so I'm going to try it the hard way. Plus, the local nursery wanted like $30 2 years ago for a 1 year old rhubarb, so I'm already saving money.