Next year’s garden

Experientia docet. So many garden learnings over the last few months.

Thinking about next year:

Layout
We will definitely be widening our beds. This year, all were three feet wide with one foot pathways.

Next year some will be 3-1/2 feet and some 5-1/2 feet wide, each will have 2-1/2 foot wide pathways.

If we keep to the existing garden area, the wider rows and paths would cut our planting bed length by half and our planting area by a third. Maybe we will increase the garden area; we certainly have the room.

Flowers
We’ll definitely have dahlias, sunflowers, and zinnias again, though we will have a more established plan to ensure as many are enjoyed as possible.

Our recent come-cut-your-own-flowers plan has worked amazingly well, so we’ll start that in June next year.

I expect to also plant peonies, but probably elsewhere on the property.

Vegetables and Herbs
We’ll have a lot more diversity and more succession planting. We’ll add herbs. We’ll install underground barriers around the beds for root vegetables and erect tunnels much earlier for the things that are vulnerable to caterpillars (because the tiny things are the most damaging). The only vegetables we’ll plant more of are tomatoes. We will have way less zucchini.

Honey
We’ll move the two hives outside the garden, away from trafficked areas.

We captured a swarm in July so technically we have three hives now, but I don’t expect the new one to make it thru the winter. Maybe we’ll add two more in the spring. We harvested 28 pounds of honey from our first hive this year. With four hives next year (two of which will be established), maybe we could harvest 150 pounds.

Timing
We’ll start the layout work in November, after the pumpkin harvest. Maybe we will just let the pumpkins overtake everything except the dahlias from now thru September.