The Seed Orders Have Arrived!

This week, I received my seed orders from my suppliers. Now that I have the seeds in hand, no back-orders, deletions or substitutes, I can continue to plan the garden layout.

I am realizing that a plan on paper (I used an aerial photo of the yard and enlarged the garden section) gives a much better idea of what you can do with the space you have. Because I know the exact size of the garden area, I was able to use a scale and complete the layout. Then, to map the layout to ensure you have compatible crops next to each other and crops that shouldn't cross-pollinate far enough away from each other within the same space. So, things like beans can be planted close to corn because beans pull nitrogen into the soil and corn needs a lot of nitrogen to grow successfully. Varieties of corn need a lot of space apart, a good minimum rule is 200 feet. A big factor is prevailing wind that could carry the tassel pollen from one type of corn to another indicating a large separation to insure cross-pollination control. Squash needs separation as well, wind not being the biggest factor but rather the wonderful little pollinators like bumble bees. Practice has shown me that 20 feet will be adequate separation as the bees seem to work a row, like they know what I am up to!

In my seed order I picked up the Rocky Mountain Bee Plant that will help encourage bees in our garden space. Similar to the Scotch Thistle in color and size, I will find a partly shady area to start these plants and hope they truly encourage the bee population to thrive. Placing these along any of our treelines may make the most sense. I will plant more flowers this year – I have ignored this in the past – as the flowers are key to having pollinators that are beneficial to the very crops we want to grow.

It's now time that I merge my seed order with my current stock and update the spreadsheet.

Next article I write will be about our land clearing proposal.