Building a tiered garden...help!

[DavidS]

Anyone have a good online garden planner?

I don't, but would still like to recommend Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Garden. It's a great book and he has a website as well. His approach to plant and seed spacing is easy to understand and very effective. I prefer organic techniques over some things he advises, but layout wise I think he's spot on.

For beds I went with a modified Hügelkultur concept. Instead of building above grade only, I went down a couple of feet into my heavy clay soil and placed logs and branches in the hole. Untreated local white oak makes up the foot above ground, except for a few I made with Eastern Red Cedar logs I'd cut around the place. The growing medium is leaf compost mixed with the dug soil. These beds take a lot of moisture from the growing medium when it's wet, and stores it in the wood beneath. When it gets dry above, there's plenty of water for plants to reach for. It's been working great for dahlias and some herbs over the last three seasons. I've made plans to convert to mostly food production this year.

One of our upside down dahlias:

[kronkmusic]

Damn i wish my yard was that big

[shinzen]

40% of the countries needs were met by the victory gardens. Think about what impact that would have today if there was a huge push towards it again. Eating local isn't new. We could ensure that nobody in the entire country went hungry if people ripped out their useless front lawns and replaced them with fruits and vegetables in a non-monocrop setup. And people would again become healthier.

[Marlene]

Hey senor, iirc, tomatoes and peppers prefer not to share intimate company

[senorgrand]

Thanks!

I actually paid $10 and subscribed to this: https://www.smartgardener.com/

It's an incredible resource. I've got the bottom tier all planned based on the seeds I have on hand.

Broccoli, chives, beets, green onions, carrots, green beans, three kinds of lettuce, tons of basil and an abundance of cucumbers.

Tomatoes and peppers will have to go in Tier 2. Wondering if I could separate them with artichokes?

[DavidS]

Damn i wish my yard was that big

It can be useful, but may also come under the Be Careful What You Wish For category. There's a LOT to take care of. Hopefully my electric riding mower will actually get delivered this week! I've been researching for two seasons and the features I want are finally available. The best part was hearing the relief an actual order seemed to give to the guy at the local store I ordered from. They're in Pennsylvania and are not allowed to have any retail customers in the store right now, but are allowed to take in inventory and make deliveries.

[Mason]

DavidS that is very cool. We are using Hugelculture on our farm which was logged five years ago. We are filling in the ruts and holes left by the logging equipment with the leftover wood and broken down stumps.

Check out my wife’s recycled seed starts. The take out food containers from our yacht club make great starter greenhouseses. The starter cups are k pods from work.

[Mason]

Here’s the photo.

[DavidS]

Check out my wife’s recycled seed starts. The take out food containers from our yacht club make great starter greenhouseses. The starter cups are k pods from work.

Nice to see those containers getting repurposed!