Smart Garden Design Leads to Seed Selection

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Make your garden a shape that flows with the area, whether simply the space available or contoured to the land. Use slopes and hillsides. Grow permeable windbreak shrubs to slow wind. If you don’t have outdoor space but have a sunny doorstep or balcony, put those containers to work!

Layouts can be any design you want! Circles with cross points, spokes, concentric, spiral! Squares like a formal British royal garden. Wild like a cottage garden or food forest garden guild. Beds in blocks. Straw bales wherever you can put them! Terraced on a slope! S curves along a current path interspersed with ornamentals! Maybe you would like to add a greenhouse this year or need a shed and convenient workspace.

If you choose to make your compost, select an easy access area for composting, near the kitchen, if you will be using it on an ongoing basis. Plant compost speeding herbs like comfrey or yarrow right next to it. They like a lot of water, and your compost needs to be kept moist, so near a spigot is good thinking. Plant pretty calendula – summer or borage – winter to hide it and bring bees and butterflies! If you use straw layers, leave space beside your composter or compost area for a bale staked in place on its end.

Plant sizes, time to maturity There are early, dwarfs, container plants that produce when they are smaller, have smaller fruits. There are long-growing biggies that demand their space, overgrow and outgrow their neighbors! Maybe you don’t need huge, but just enough for just you since it’s only you in your household. Or it’s not a favorite, but you do like a taste! The time it takes to mature for harvest depends on the weather, soil, watering practices, whether you feed it or not along the way. The size depends on you and the weather also, but mainly on the variety you choose. You can plant smaller varieties while you plant longer, maturing larger fruiting varieties for a steady table supply. How long it takes to maturity and the footprint size of your mature plant is critical to designing your garden, making it all fit.

Look up each of your plant choices. Make a list – name, variety, days to maturity, mature spacing. The mature spacing gives a good indication of how tall your plant might get and if it will shade out other plants. If you put your list on your computer, you can click on the column to reorganize the list per footprint space/height or days to maturity.
Your purpose may be for your and your family’s daily food, as a chef for your clients, for a Food Bank. Fruit and nut trees may be part of your long-term plan.

Pamer

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