Here’s the garden plan so far. The beds are 4x5 and are actually going to be all in a straight line (not in a rectangle like the diagram shows) running east/west with the top left bed in the diagram being the west-most one. There is going to be 24" of walking/working space around each one on all sides and all beds will have large trellises at the back (north side), with the fourth probably having a trellis for the melons on the west side too. I’m hoping to use a 33/33/33 mixture of peat moss, vermiculite, and compost; tonight I’ll figure out how many cubic feet of each I’d need for the beds (which are 12" high) and then tomorrow I’ll price it all out. I’d rather not go with "traditional" soil.

Some of the squares (each one is one square foot) are blank because I don’t know what I want to put in them. Some of the squares (for example, the carrots) will be planted in stages - plant a few, let them sprout and grow a little, plant some more, etc, so they’re not all ready to pick at the same time. It is just me and B and occasionally S and his daughter so it’s not like I’m feeding a family of five. The tomatoes and peppers will hopefully be made into salsa and sauce and the like, hence the relatively large number of those plants.

Not much has been going on since I last posted, hence the lack of posting for an entire week…

B had his very first soccer get-together ever. I’m not sure I can call it a practice although maybe it sort of was. They met the coach, got their schedules and uniforms, and kicked the ball around a bit. Or sort of. B is one of the youngest ones, I think, at 3.5 in the Under 5 group. He was alternately interested and disinterested and while he didn’t line up with the other kids to attmpt goals on the coach or attempt passing back and forth to a partner, he did get together with his partner from a previous exercise and they kicked the ball back and forth between themselves. You could literally see B warming up to the whole experience with each kick. Here’s my poor little urchin in his too-big uniform, squinting into the sun.

The garden is coming along nicely behind the scenes. I sat down the other night and yesterday and, using graph paper, mapped out how many beds I could fit along the length of my fence and then planned out what would go in each square foot. It was surprisingly difficult since according to companion gardening, corn does not like to be with tomatoes (for example). When I dropped B off to my parents on my way in to work last night, Dad was cutting the last of the boards; I opted to go with 4-foot x 5-foot beds instead of the traditional 4x4 since they fit better for me, left me with 24" of space between the beds instead of 22", and left me more room at the driveway end of the fence, where there are a few patio stones at the gate that I was afraid of running into. Now to get my plants out there. A couple of my tomatoes are getting what appears to be a bit of blight on a few leaves. It seems to be contained to a single cluster on the affected plants so I’ve pinched off that shoot but I’ll have to read up on it and see what I need to do to help it and prevent it. I was hoping to get things into the garden by Friday but we had some good frost this morning and it’s -1C right now with a projected high of only 9C today (insane!!!) so I guess there’s no rush. Hopefully soon though. In the meantime, I’ll spend some time poking around the ft2garden site and one of the other square-foot gardening forums.