Elbow Room

The last time I was here I was talking about how amazing companion planting is.  The less exciting part of planning your garden layout is figuring out exactly where plants should go in relation to each other.  It is important to make sure you can easily access each plant without damaging anything but other then that there is a lot of personal preference for design.  Some people like to plant in rows, others group many plants together in one square area.  I tend to be a bit more of a mess and just put plants where ever they seem to fit.  Especially since I rarely have many plants of the same species.  Whichever way you choose, those little plant information tabs come in handy:

Most of these tabs will show each plant's suggested spacing.  Once I know what plants benefit from each other I look at their specific spacing requirements and figure out a general distance that should be left between them.  I like to place the information tabs into the dirt while I'm looking at spacing that way I have a good visual of how everything is coming together and can easily see if plant spaces are starting to overlap at all.  

We learned last time that tomatoes, peppers, basil, and marigolds all do well together.  My garden area has a little southern wall along the back; I decided to put the tomatoes along there since they will be tall enough that the sun will be able to reach them.  Thankfully they are still short enough (for now) that the plants to the north are still in full sun as well.  Using them as anchors I worked my way out determining where my other plants should be placed.  One companion planting site mentioned that it was good for hot peppers to be shaded by other plants to block some of the sun and create a more humid climate.  Because of this I placed my pepper plant a bit close to one of the tomato plants.  I put the basil between the two tomato plants and planted two marigolds on either side of them for protection.  The finished product looks like:

I have decided to name my gardens the way they name hurricanes...I give you: Alice, West

Some times deciding where to place your plants is a pretty easy puzzle and you can start to use other methods to plan.  For example, in the top left of the picture you can see a pea plant.  Since there are two tomato plants I wasn't sure which one to put in the middle.  Then I noticed the tomatoes have different days to fruit maturity but one of them is similar to the pea maturity.  I hypothesize that plants will need more nutrients to sustain themselves during fruit production so I separated the plants with similar maturity dates to make sure they aren't competing against each other at that important time.  I also made it a point to surround the entire garden with marigolds in hopes of offering extra protection.

My final step was to make a quick drawing of Alice's general layout for quick reference:

Alice Layout

Some quick notes:

- Alice ended up being a bit squished since we bought more plants then we actually had room for.  That zucchini to the far left is way too close to the strawberries and marigolds!

- Some of you more experienced green thumbs may be yelling "what about zone information?!"  I am fortunate to be in zone 8b where winter comes late (if ever) and we are hoping to have a greenhouse up in the next month where we can transplant to.  Because of these two things I chose to ignore that part for now and will touch on it in a later post when it is more relevant.
- You may have noticed my tomato trellis is not very conventional.  Instead of going out and spending money on one of those fancy circular tomato homes I used a couple sides of an old dog play area fence.  I'm not sure how the tomatoes are going to go but so far the pea vines seem to love it!

Ta