Planning (yet another gardening post)

I've been itching to get outside and start working on my garden - but the weather hasn't cooperated at all.  Friday it snowed - only a little, but it was still too cold to work outside.  Saturday was perfect, but we had guests coming over so garden work was not a possibility.  Today?  Rain which turned to thunderstorms in the evening.  Tomorrow?  The ground is going to be waaaaay too muddy (thanks to said rain).

I really needed to do SOMETHING related to my garden.  I remembered that the landlord didn't want me to break ground until he saw what I was planning...I had thought to outline the areas I planned to use with sticks and string, but I decided that I was going to do something a bit more impressive.

I decided to chart out exactly what I planned to do with the backyard.

Last year, Sean and I had gone out and measured the entire property in order to get an idea of what kind of space I had to work with.  I still had the measurements - and I had graph paper.  It took hours, but I finally managed to come out with something I am proud of.

Here's the graph showing the available space in our backyard (the shaded areas are areas that can't be used for planting - sidewalk, central air unit, entrance to crawl space, etc.:

The sketch is to scale - the four garden beds measure 25 feet by 4 feet, so each bed is 100 square feet.  As you can see, they should not be visible from the street (which is something the landlord requested).

Then I decided to draw out each bed in more detail, to figure out what I was going to plant in what bed.  This one was harder, because I couldn't just draw plants in there willy-nilly - I had to check with each seed packet and find out how much space was needed for each plant, and which plant needs full sun and which needs partial sun...it was a nightmare.  I also had to sort the seeds by height - the taller plants needed to be north-facing, the shorter plants on the southern side of the garden.  This prevents the taller plants from shading the shorter plants and stealing their much needed sunlight.

  

Now, I know this will probably bore a lot of people, so feel free to skip the next part if you want to.  I'm going to post pics of each garden bed individually - this way, even if I lose the paper I drew this on, I still have a readable record of the work.

 

(Bed 1 - northernmost bed)

 (Bed 2)

 

(Bed 3)

 (Bed 4)

If I have any gardeners reading this blog, please comment and let me know what you think of this.