New Herb Garden’s Plan 2018

New Herb garden August 2017

This post is about the New Herb garden for this year. I did a post on the Small vegetable garden https://steemit.com/gardening/@goldenoakfarm/small-garden-s-plan-2018
and the Big vegetable garden
https://steemit.com/gardening/@goldenoakfarm/big-garden-s-plan-2018 .

These gardens provide enough food for our family of 3 for a whole year. There’s also enough extra to sell some on our little farm stand.

I make the plan on the GrowVeg program as it keeps track of where each plant family has been for the last 3 years. It gives a warning if you try to put something in that area. For a clearer picture go to:

https://www.growveg.com/garden-plans/874058/

I then transfer it to graph paper, as that survives best when taken to the garden for planting.

The big spruce, little spruce and maple tree along the west side

This garden measures 50’ North-South and 37’ feet East-West. It is oriented due North-South. It gets full sun from morning until mid afternoon. There are spruce and maple trees along its west side that shade part of it in the afternoon. We hope to take down the 2 spruces as they are dying.

The soil is sandy river bottom loam. It has had nothing done to it for 35 years as it was lawn until 2016, when I created this garden, so it is in very poor shape. It is tested each November when everything has stopped growing. I put the custom amendment mix down as I plant as the entire garden is kept mulched.

Heliotrope August 2017

I plan to plant many different flowers in the garden, some edible and some just to attract pollinators. Many of the herbs are also flowering plants and pollinator attractants.

Borage and bee August 2017

The beds are East-West and measure 4’ wide x 31’ long. I give each variety maximum spacing so they can reach their maximum potential. The first 2 years I had vegetables in this garden also. This year it is just herbs.

This garden was planned so I would have enough herbs for dehydrating for the layers during the winter, and some for our use. I have 2 much smaller herb gardens but they have poor soil and don’t produce much.

This year I turned most of row #7 nearest the house into the bed that got all the herbs that were in the Big vegetable garden. They have all been transplanted and mulched. The next project is to remove the bed of creeping thyme in row #1 to under the trees.