We started talking about our summer 2008 garden even before last year’s growing season had come to an end. We didn’t get a garden going until the middle of July last year. That’s not the optimal time to plant a garden, especially in Utah. We didn’t have a lot of choice, though, because we had just moved in (the previous fall) and hadn’t connected to our city’s pressurized irrigation system yet. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out as many vegetables as we are used to growing.

This year will be much better. We are more serious this time. And we’ve started earlier in the season. We probably would have started even earlier, but we’ve had an unusually cold and snowy Spring.

Our backyard has a large area setup as a vegetable garden. It also has a lot of area designed for trees, shrubs, and flowers. We have most of the trees planted in those areas, but not much else… which means there will be weeds. To combat the weeds in the non-vegetable garden areas, we have decided to grow squash and pumpkins. I think that means we’ll end up with roughly 2000 square feet of vegetable garden this Summer.

A few weeks ago, Charmaine started several plants inside the house. She had planters with tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, yellow squash, and green bell peppers. Around the same time she started pulling weeds from the major garden areas. Our next-door neighbor saw her out there slaving away and brought his garden tiller over and cleaned up the garden in no time. But that was only about half the area we intended to plant this year. He couldn’t run the tiller through the flower garden areas, because of the trees. So Charmaine went back to pulling weeds.

After a few weeks, she has most of it cleared and we’ve started planting. We kept a log to keep track of what was planted, when it was planted, and where it was planted.

My friend Matt has a fantastic vegetable garden every year. He gave me a hint about planting rows of corn at different time intervals, so the corn would be ready at different time intervals in the fall. We planted 2 rows of corn the first week, and 2 more rows 2 weeks later. If we had been smarter, we would have generalized that idea to planting other crops, such as carrots, onions, radishes, etc. Maybe next year.

Here’s what we have in the ground so far:

Designated Vegetable Garden area:
– corn (4 rows at the back of the designated vegetable garden area)
– cucumbers (1 row)
– lemon cucumbers (1 row)
– carrots (1 row)
– radishes (0.25 row)
– leeks (0.75 row)
– beets (1 row)
– turnips (1 row)
– pole beans (3 rows)
– bush beans (1 row)
– onions (1 row)
– Brussels sprouts (0.5 row)
– green bell peppers (1 row)
– tomatoes (3 rows)

Flower Garden areas:
– zucchini (1 plant)
– yellow squash (1 plant)
– butternut squash (3 hills)
– spaghetti squash (3 hills)
– hubbard squash (3 hills)
– Burgess squash (3 hills)
– big max pumpkins (2 hills)
– Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins (2 hills)
– Jack of all trades pumpkins (3 hills)
– cantaloupe (6 plants)
– Jack Be Little pumpkins (3 hills)
– Sppoktacular pumpkins (3 hills)
– Giant pumpkins (2 hills)
– cucumbers (3 hills)

I’m hoping we get around to planting:
– acorn squash
– peas
– strawberries
– lettuce
– spinach
– jalapeno peppers
– potatoes
– sage
– chives
– basil
– rosemary
– grapes
– raspberries
– fruit trees (peach, apricot, something else)

I need to start construction on cages for tomatoes, beans, and peas. One of the biggest obstacles has been the wind. When Charmaine transplanted her starts to the garden, almost all of them were destroyed by a windstorm that night.