Revised! 2017: The Year of The Full Garden

So I know my last post was all about how I was doing a half garden. I thought it would make life easier. However I got some great advice from more than one of you (thank you!) who explained that it's not good for the garden to just simply leave the beds. There would still be work involved to keep the earth worms happy and keep pests and weeds from moving in. And if we're doing all this work, we should plant something to help the soil repair itself. The easiest option turned out to be planting two beds of low maintenance flowers. (Low maintenance being key!)

So here's the revised garden plan - the empty beds will now be alyssum, impatiens, zinnias. We will keep the herbs in the same place with the cucumbers and radishes here (with more space). The final bed will still be tomatoes.

Over the weekend we finally planted the garden as well! Three weeks later than I would like, but the weather has been weird. Like too cold (with frost warnings at night), too hot (at 97) or too rainy. We went to the nursery and picked up basil, tomatoes and some flowers for pots. The cucumbers, radishes, zinnias and alyssum are all from seed.

One difference between my revised drawing and reality is the tomatoes. We were planning on buy 6 tomatoes. But then at the greenhouse we had two options -  slightly smaller plants in 4-packs for $2.50 a pack, or slightly larger tomatoes in a single pot for $5. And the size difference, due to the weird weather, was maybe an inch in height and thickness. So obviously we decided to do 12 tomato plants instead of 6, the only downside being we could only do 3 varieties - we went with red cherry tomatoes (sweet 100s), lemon boys and early girls.

There's still a lot of work to do back here, but at least things are started. The impatiens are coming this weekend. The pathways are completely covered in weeds. We need to put deer netting back up (not for deer, but for the chipmunks that seem to have an easy time climbing chicken wire but not netting) and fix the gate.