Garden Plan: 2020!!!

New Year, New Decade, New Garden. Well technically the garden was finished in 2019, but this is the first year I get to use it fully, with a full growing season ahead of me. *Insert overly excited squeal of glee here*

Since the new garden brings everything to a new level, I'm bringing my A-game. With 5 beds, more garden support structures and a mix of plant pots - this year is going to be my favorite year yet. It's going to be productive and beautiful. I found an incredible deal on amazon for tomato towers (like 10 for $12) so now I have enough support structures in various sizes for everything that needs it, plus a new archway and small obelisk I got for Christmas. And I even went and bought some legit reusable plant markers this year in bulk so I'll know what goes where all season long instead of things melting in the rain and leaving me to guess. Even a fully illustrated garden plan (to scale!).

Here's my garden plan for 2020:

Let's start at the top and work our way down.

The beds at the top are the perennial beds at the back that won't rotate.These are already planted with lavender, rosemary, thyme, oregano and strawberries. In the spring I plan on adding marjoram and basil, as well as two sunflowers in the empty spots because the one we planted last year was a cheerful addition I really enjoyed. The height added some nice structure to the garden, and who doesn't love a sunflower? The aqua ring on the right is the large aqua pot I added last summer, this year I want to plant nasturtiums in there to cascade down.

The four main beds rotate each year, I've always rotated them clockwise so I will continue to do that out of habit. This means the top left bed will be tomatoes (they were bottom left last summer). I've planted as many as 12 tomatoes in a 4x8 bed and as few as 6. I think 8 is the magic number to give them space to grow properly and fill the bed, so that's my plan for seed starting this spring. It's hard to choose just 8 but I think I have it narrowed down to 2 sweet 100's cherry, 1 yellow pear, italian paste, early girl, beefsteak, purple cherokee and bloody butcher.

One thing that's new this year will be a new archway/arbor over the center path in the garden between the two back beds. In the tomato bed I'm planting green beans at the bottom to grow up the archway vertically (they never seem to need much horizontal space, so I think they will work fine here). In the bed on the top right, I'm planing malabar spinach (a tropical warm weather vine with leaves that taste exactly like spinach) to grow up the other side. In this bed will also be carrots, musk melons on an obelisk support structure, cucumbers on their usual 3 panel trellis (which is hard to draw so forgive the weird shape). There will be a couple rows of bright lights rainbow swiss chard and I'm filling the extra ground space with nasturtiums here because I enjoyed them so much last year. We are taking a break from squash and pumpkins for a full 3 years to attempt to break the cycle of the squash vine borers that keep destroying my attempts at zucchini.

(image again for reference and less scrolling)

The two bottom beds are for cut flowers. Having so many flowers in my flower cutting garden last year was an unexpected joy. It was meant to be a filler, a stopgap since vegetables didn't have enough time to grow, but I just loved it. The endless bouquets were such a treat and I loved that the more I cut, the more flowers grew. It inspired me to learn more, watch video tutorials from Floret, and discover that flower farming is a legit thing. So this year, I will have a dedicated dahlia bed and then one with a mix of my favorite zinnias, chantilly bronze snapdragons (totally new to me) and globe amaranth (which I grew last year in my border garden beds and they just make the best cut flowers). You can see all the dahlias in my dahlia obsession post.

At the bottom of the drawing is the back of the garage, with the aqua flower pots and white trellis leaning on it. I'm hoping that some of the begonia bulbs I saved from last year will come back and can be planted in the smaller pots and in the big pot with the trellis I want to plant a morning glory from seed to climb up. The pink rose on the bottom left will hopefully take off next spring and cover the garden entryway arbor with pink blooms. It ended its growing season strong so I have high hopes.

Below is the drawing with plant labels. Sorry it's hard to read my admittedly bad handwriting at this scale, but if you click on the image you can see it full size. And probably still not be able to read it, but at least it's bigger.

Everything in the garden plan will be from seed (or bulb) except the basil, because I cannot for the life of me grow basil successfully from seed. The tomatoes, snapdragons, morning glory, and globe amaranth will be started indoors in early March.

I have plans for the rest of the yard as well (more flowers to start from seed, plans for the rest of my split dahlia bulbs, and other new additions) which I will hopefully have a chance to share soon. Some things flourished last year, some things didn't. Some things that did well the year before never came back and had to be replaced. Who knows what won't come back this year. It's the way of garden. A dance with mother nature, equal parts joyful and frustrating.