Country Life Experiment

Simple Country Living

Simple Country Living: How To Plan A Vegetable Garden

This post first appeared on my blog in 2013. I’m reposting some of my most popular and favourite posts on Sundays throughout the year.
I’ve had several questions about how we keep track of the garden and plan for it. Let me be clear, Country Boy does all the garden stuff. He has a degree in Horticulture, and many years of experience growing plants commercially, so he knows what he is doing. He has always been into gardening. I’m really good at nodding my head and making encouraging noises.
Country Boy has a diagram of our gardens which he uses to note what is in each row. He uses a new one every six months (Summer and Winter), and keeps the old ones so that he can remember what was grown in which place in the previous year. That way he can rotate the crops around. 

One of the advantages of living on the farm is that there is plenty of space for a large garden, which Country Boy has taken full advantage of. There are about 80 rows available in the garden. Each row is about four meters long, and all of them have drip irrigation.

He also keeps a diary where he notes when he planted different crop, what he has picked, and when he pulled out various plants. He notes down anything else he did in the garden. Again, it helps in the following year to know what worked and what didn’t.

Generally we like to grow heirloom vegetables, that is varieties of vegetables that have been handed down for many generations. The seeds can be saved and grown again (unlike hybrid varieties which are found in most nurseries). We like the ethics associated these types of plants, and that you can get heaps of different colours, tastes, and shapes of each vegetable which you will never find in a supermarket because they don’t fit their narrow ideas of what a vegetable should be.

Each year we like to grow a few new types of vegetables just to see what they are like. Country Boy has planted 11 different types of tomatoes this year.

We also consider how much we grew last year and whether it was enough. For example, we had way too many cucumbers last year (over 2000!) so this year we have cut back a little. Also we didn’t have enough broad beans so this year we have planted more

This summer we are planting tomatoes, corn, zucchinis, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, egg plants, capsicums, and basil to name a few. The garden takes up a fair bit of Country Boy’s time. Depending on the time of year, he can spend several hours everyday planting, picking, and preparing the garden.

I hope that answers a few questions! Got anything else you want to know about our country life?
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