Previously: Early Garden Planning 2021

I've got all my seeds in the mail, except for a few experimental ones. (Experimental to me—to the seeds it's just another day.) I've got a few extra plant lights, and I'm waiting on a shipment of peat pots, then I'll get the seeds started for later transplant. Then out they go.

That's all there is to it: (1) decide what to get; (2) get; (3) prepare; (4) plant. It's almost Too Easy—so easy, perhaps, that I'll just consider it done already and move on to something else because I got enough seeds to start a neighborhood garden jungle, and I still have a backyard that is a literal pile of clay from excavating the trench for the wall and steps.

...

That's where my head is this weekend. I need to get a few slow things moving inside, then go outside and use the daylight to build. In the meantime—between now and outdoors planting—I need to decide what goes where. Nominally I'd do that before starting seeds, but I'm just going to wing it with a variety of things this year, since I know I selected them intentionally to be planted, I just have to figure out where... and when... and how.

The garden (gardens) will break down roughly into a few regions or features:

• Three sisters (corn + squash + beans)
• Native wildflowers and grass
• Tomatoes (these needy bastards need their own category)
• Backdoor garden (herbs, leaves, onions, etc.)
• Things on vines that will grow up bamboo poles onto the deck
• Things that will grow on trellises, because I can put trellises everywhere and it helps me consume this obnoxious bamboo patch
• A bunch of random vegetables that will stand on their own
• Things to improve the soil here and there (beans for nitrogen, comfrey for compost, daikon to bust up the clay and decompose in place)
• Tree seeds (pawpaw, Chinese hawthorn) that I'll get started but won't get planted for a while, obviously

The first step seems to be, since it will take a few weeks: getting the milkweed seeds ready to germinate. We'll start there.

For the rest I'll get an inventory going—I've already forgotten exactly what I've got—and start some specific planning. Here we go: the fashionably cool content that everyone subscribes for.