The Garden Beds for 2024

 

Usually I never bother with planning or keeping a written record of what I have planted where, or what should go here or there.  I have tried it once or twice, but have never followed through with keeping track of it.  It would probably be handy, but what with so many variables going on, I just don't bother.  This year will be no exception.

It's not that I just throw things out willy-nilly, I usually have a plan in mind, or at least a reason for planting things where I plant them.  But often my plans go awry for one reason or another, usually a crop failure, or a cat digs up the area, or my child has other ideas, or a certain spot gets drowned out by a record rainfall.  Last year the volunteer tomato plants I took pity on pretty much overwhelmed and squelched my okra and beets.  This year no volunteers of any kind will be tolerated; unless the volunteer is a sunflower.  Then it will be relocated.  I am not going to deny the birds their sustenance. 

This year the two garden beds near the house, pictured above, are going to be dedicated to just a few specific crops, as it were.  The top garden bed is going to initially be mostly onions.  On the right side I have planted onion bulbs.  I only plant the white and yellow bulbs, because I have no use for red onions.  This year it is mostly white onion bulbs, because the yellow bulbs were in pretty poor shape straight from the suppliers.  The left part of the top garden bed is a mixture of white and yellow onion slips, or plants.  The yellow slips are supposed to be a candy onion, but we shall see how they will turn out.  The bulbs become the green onions that Gary and Ellen love so much.  The plants, with any luck and some good weather, will become the big "dry" onions I will try to pull and store for a few months. 

The bottom bed is dedicated to radishes, lettuce and beets.  From right to left; white icicle radishes, French Breakfast radishes, Black-seeded Simpson lettuce.  Then there is an open dry spot followed by at least 6 rows, maybe 8 rows, of beets.  In each bed there is an open, unplanted spot in the middle.  These are my thinking spots; as in I am still thinking of what to plant there.  Usually I put in a second planting of radishes, so as to keep the harvest going until it gets too hot for the.  I will probably do that as well.  

Where the onion bulbs are planted I usually put in something else that takes longer to mature.  The green onions always get harvested pretty early in the growing season, so I try to double up the crop and have something else growing there.  Last year it was the volunteer pumpkin vine in my onions, along with pepper plants.  But last year the peppers in the garden beds did not do well at all; they pretty much withered and crashed.  So I shall have to see what I will attempt to put in there to take over after the onions are gone.