Garden Plans

Garden Plans

I've been busy preparing for both my Fall and Spring garden and thought I'd share my plans.  I don't consider myself a radical survivalist but to quote Jason Robertson, "Food from grocery stores scares me."  I don't think we have any idea what we are eating any more.  Between the pesticides, herbicides, hybridization and genetic modifications the food we buy to eat has changed dramatically over the last fifty years.  Most of these changes were designed to improve productivity and not necessarily nutritive value.  Some may be harmful over the long term.  Anyway, I am going the heirloom and organic seed route as much as possible.

I've got about an acre inside my fence that I am preparing for the garden (includes fruits and vegetables).  A diagram of what I am working toward is shown below.  Our soil is well suited for blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, persimmon trees, figs trees, peach trees, citrus trees and any type of melon.  It needs some improvement for apples, pears, plums and most vegetables.  At the beginning of fall, I planted a mixture of oats and Austrian winter peas in all of the garden areas.  When these crops mature (around January) I will cut them down and disk them into the soil.  This will add both Nitrogen and organic material to my sandy soil.  After allowing three weeks for the soil to absorb these new nutrients, I will plant all of the berries and the fruit trees and get started on the Spring garden.   

You can see that I have divided the vegetable area into three sections.  Each is fifty feet wide by one hundred feet long.  I will rotate using them for vegetables every three years.  The other two years they will be in a cover crop or in some other phase of improvement.  This avoids overuse of the soil, allows time for soil improvement and avoidance of plant diseases (common when the same soil is overused). 

 

I did plant a small Fall salad garden (20'x20') this year.  As the soil wasn't quite right, I had some topsoil delivered and spread it around.  I planted: radishes, carrots, mixed greens, butternut lettuce, broccoli and kale.  It's been raining so everything is coming up and looking good.  With the weather patterns in south central Texas, we can have a Fall garden continuously through the "Winter" and can generally start a Spring garden in February.

 

I saw an article on the Internet recently proclaiming that Texas was the future of America.  It supported this claim with a list of ten reasons including jobs, land and housing cost, cost of living, low taxes and finally the rise of new cowboys (people moving to Texas to find a better and more self-sufficient lifestyle).  I guess I fall into that category as I wasn't born in Texas but got here as fast as I could.