Garden Planning

With these spring like temperatures and the arrival of the Burpee seed catalog, I can't help but to think about gardening.  I'll be starting all of my plants from seed again, so that means my gardening schedule starts in a couple of weeks.  I use a method of gardening called Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholemew.  My dad started doing it back in 1989 and had huge success.  In case you aren't familiar with square foot gardening, you basically use raised beds made of 2x6 lumber that are 4 feet square, split the box into 16 sq ft and plant each square foot.  Some vegetables take 1 plant per square foot while others fit as many as 16 plants per square foot.  Last year I had nine 4x4 boxes and two 10x1 boxes, for tomatoes, which produced enough food to feed my family for an entire year plus give a lot away to friends and family.

This year, I'm adding two 12x1 boxes to go on the back side of the garden which will house the cucumbers and possibly winter squash.  I'm also planning on adding wooden walkways between the boxes using the old decking boards from our deck.  The final addition to the garden would be to collect the water off the barn roof and run drip irrigation lines to the boxes set on a timer for morning and evening waterings.  I won't really start any of those projects until the spring, but my spring TODO list just keeps getting bigger.

As for the garden plantings, here is my plan:
144 green beans
144 yellow wax beans
16 bell peppers (last year the plants were 5 ft tall)
4 jalepeno peppers
4 cayenne peppers
4 hungarian hot wax peppers
2 habanero peppers
2 bhut jolokia peppers
256 carrots
1 zucchini
1 crooked neck squash
64 garlic
64 onions
100+ radishes (I plant and harvest one square of radishes each week until July, then again in the fall)
64 beets
64 turnips
12 heads of lettuce
4 squares of leaf lettuce
20 tomatoes (mostly paste tomatoes for sauce)
4 cucumbers
1 winter squash