Its the time of year where you start planning out your gardens, the cold snowy days are perfect for plotting and planning/checking seed boxes and orders and planning out the early starts. 

This spring we will be coming into our fourth spring for the Kitchen Garden and I do love having one, its outstanding to walk out the door, poke around the kitchen garden snipping this, pulling that, picking this and that, taking up the fresh herbs and back into the kitchen I go. The photo example above is plot one and plot 2. 

As always a garden is movement and flux..  Plot 1 for 2023 is getting climbing fence on the house side with a salad medley of items on the rest of the area with some pops of orange. 

Plot 2 is also getting a bit of a adjustment, as I need to move the blocks in a line to make sure that the propane line when it fills the tanks has a “stopper” from the line sliding into the garden bed. In plot two I am putting in a cucumber climber for patio cucumbers, so they will be smaller stocker plants and then for the back end, I am going to place big tomato ring and will be putting in a sweet one thousand cherry tomato that will be a massive early start and will produce till frost.

Plot three is a deep bed and everything in it thrives, it has been planted with so many things over the past few years as you can see above, each year I lose more space to the fruit bushes. Coming into year four, there is just a narrow row on the front of the bed available.

I will need to get new photos of this area come spring because plot three is now massively overtaken by the fruit bushes in a big way, so I am just going to plant the front row into strawberries to finish it out into a full fruit bed.

Ah, plot 4 is such a dream to work with, the combo of the vertial climber with the front and back into ground veggies work, anything that likes half shade does wonderful on both sides of this plot, it helps keep the greens from bolting and the back half does amazing for carrots, beets or parsnips. The sloped backside of the plot is in strawberries for added stability. 

Its a very early bed in the season, it warms up beautifully, I often can have pea’s producing here weeks before other areas.

Now plot five has been in strawberries with a comfrey plant for the past few years and its getting a revamp this year, the strawberries there was put in the first year and the oldest are ready for the compost pile and last year I let them go crazy with the babies, so the babies will be taken out and put into the row on plot 3. 

I am do have cabbage moths but I rarely have a issue with them, none the less they will have marigolds and celery intermixed with them. Did you know that they do not like the scent of celery, I am not planning on eating this celery fresh, because it will be grown in full sun, its going to be super strong and on the bitter side so it will be dried, ground and added to soup blends in the end. 

That comfrey is getting bigger then I would like, so there will be a lot of cut and drop on it, I do want it to flower but I do not want it to go to seed, I am hoping to get three or maybe four cuttings from it. and plan to just drop it around the cabbage/celery as ground cover mulch. 

Do you have a kitchen garden? if so, how close to the house? what is your favorite to have in it? How big is yours. Each of my beds are 20 feet long by 4 feet wide with 2 foot pathways.