It’s Time to Plant, Let’s Go!

2021 Vegetable Garden Goals… New fence, garden layout design, soil prep and irrigation improvements.

By caroline1858 in Mud Pies and Peonies, Vegetable Gardening on May 10, 2021May 10, 2021

2021 Vegetable Garden in the ground

Garden Planning

We stumbled on our love of vegetable gardening last year during quarantine. The garden was a peaceful spot to walk through in the mornings with our coffee, and pluck fresh lettuce leaves for meals. Our three year old became a pro at harvesting perfectly ripe tomatoes and enjoyed more than a few cucumbers right off the vine. Our goal for 2021 is to draw on lessons learned from 2020 and expand our Vegetable Garden.

Up our fence Game

Our T Post and Wire fence was effective last year against all the wildlife on our property. We have deer, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, all sorts of birds, box turtles, snakes, a few foxes, and the occasional bear wandering through. Thankfully, other than an abundance of deer, we have a pretty healthy and balanced ecosystem here! Ha! And, a simple garden fence was all the protection we needed.

So, I gave my husband this image from Pinterest, and told him we needed the fence up by the end of March. *Joking… sort of* It was a fun project that we were able to get the whole family involved in.

The only thing I wouldn’t do again is use barn paint. It took so many coats to paint it white and I still have a lot of touch ups to do!

As far as the design goes, I love how open this fence is. We dug a trench around the whole perimeter of the garden so that the wire actually goes several inches into the ground. We used Hatteras Flat Top Redwood Deck Post Caps on all of the posts. They make wonderful coffee mug and wine glass rests when you get the urge to pull a few weeds or harvest a few vegetables! We tried to match our pinterest inspiration hardware as best we could. We found these hinges and this latch from Lowe’s. We added two solar light post caps on either side of the gate so we have a little light out there if we need to gather some veggies during dinner.

Drawing and Designing the Vegetable Garden

Next, I consulted my companion planting guide from Homestead and Chill. (This is a wonderful free resource she provides. If you’re not already following her, you absolutely should!) Using my companion planting guide, I drew up a design for our new garden bed. Remember to consider direction of the sun and plant height of neighboring plants. Last year my behemoth cucumber situation engulfed my onions. Oops! My other goal was to do more groupings of plants versus neat long lines of each variety.

Check out our full list of what we plant to plant this year.

Preparing the Garden for Planting

At the end of the 2020 harvest we planted this rye cover crop over our garden site. Two weeks before we started planting this year, we tilled the rye with our electric garden tiller and let it die back and feed the soil.

Our site is slightly slanted in the northeast corner, so we ordered six yards of bed mix to help better level out the site.

Now, we are fortunate enough to have an old well on our property that used to service the house. We got that up and running again with a new pump and ran a new hydrant right to the edge of the vegetable garden. The pressure off this thing is truly incredible and I plan to use it to feed soaker hoses.