Envision the Harvest

Here, let's post the amounts of each item you are interested in harvesting.  An example would be, I want to have enough for a salad a day for a week (small example).  This would be a certain amount of different types of lettuces, some radishes, carrots, etc.  Think specifically what you are interested in having.  If we do 3 4' x 8' beds, that will be 96 ft² of garden that we are trying to plan.  We want to figure out how much of everything that we want to plant at what time.  If you envision your harvest that will help to plan our planting!

Please comment.

Garden Site Pictures

Here are some pictures of the possible site for the garden by the Spangler Memorial shelter house.  We can relocate the fire pit.

Garden Layout

Here's a possible layout for the garden.  I know that we had spoken about only using 3 4' x 8' garden beds to start out.  I made this layout with 6 4' x 8' beds because we could have it laid out for future expansion and just not use them this year.  If we only put in fencing around the 3 4' x 8' beds (as shown in dotted line) that would be a 24' x 14' fenced in area or 76 linear feet of fencing.  However, if we extend the fencing to include the full size (twice as much area for gardening), then we would only be adding 22' of linear feet of fencing.  We would get 192 ft² of garden for 98 linear feet fencing, instead of the 96 ft² of garden for 76 linear feet.  Do you think the extra future garden space is worth the extra fencing?

There are other considerations for space.  Do we want to have the rain barrels inside of the fence?  Do we want to have one side of the fence be the wall of the shelter house?  Would this be a problem for the property committee?  Do we want to have our compost bins inside of the fencing?  Do we want to have storage for tools or anything else inside of the fence?  We will have room for some storage inside the shelter house.  Do we want to have a lock on the fence door or just a latch?

Please comment on any or all of these thoughts or others you have about the layout.

Raised Beds

In the book All New Square Foot Gardening book, they talk about using 2" x 6" 's in 4' x 4' squares to make the beds.  Do we want to have them laying on top of the ground, which is simpler, but requires everyone to kneel to tend the garden?  Or, do we want to have them elevated to a height of 30" (the height of a table or desktop)?  This could make it easier for people who have trouble getting up and down, but the construction would be more difficult and costly to support the weight of the box and soil.

What are your thoughts?  Please comment.

Deer Prevention

Here let's discuss ideas for keeping the deer from getting to our plants.  I was thinking about a big tall fence about 10' high.  We could use 4"x4" posts for securing the fence to the ground and maybe 2"x4" 's to extend the height.  We could staple chicken wire to the 2"x4" 's around and put a three foot door in one location.  I don't have any experience with building a fence like that, does anyone else?  Also, I heard about the two fence method, where you have a lower fence inside of a higher one.  The deer won't jump the first one because they can see that they wouldn't clear the second one.  That way the overall height doesn't have to be as high.  Please comment with your thoughts.

Soil

I'm reading the All New Square Foot Gardening book that Paula lent me.  They talk about using 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost and 1/3 peat moss.  Is this the kind of soil that we want to use in our garden?  Does anyone have any good places that we can get these ingredients, if that is the way that we want to go?  Please comment.