[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by chesapeake

Excited to follow along. I love gardening and have my own 25'x5' plot on the south side of my house in the DC suburbs. For both good and ill, however, the neighborhood is lush with 50+ year old oak trees, so no square inch of land in my yard gets more than 6 hours of sunshine a day. That's too little for a lot of veggies to thrive. But I can grow lettuce, kale, chard and other leafy greens successfully. The limited hours of sunlight keep them from bolting quite as quickly as they would otherwise.



It's been so rainy in NoVA this year that even crops that do OK for me--I'm usually able to get a few squash, zucchini and pole beans to grow, but all the rain in August and September made this year's crop really poor. I had one squash and had my first harvest of 30-40 beans just this weekend. Most years, we're already sick of both by now. Sounds like your growing season in NC was better than ours.

Better, but not as good as I would have hoped. Definitely not having as much sun is a challenge. Our next-door neighbors tried to grow on the other side of the fence and didn't fare well at all, likely because of the lack of sunlight.

Originally Posted by Critch

I'll be following along, looking for hints and ideas as a rookie vegetable growing hobbiest myself.

I started container vegetable growing on my deck about 4 years ago, started out with one container for a couple of tomato plants and got a bit carried away and ended up with eight containers spread across my deck.

Heh. Yeah, it's easy to get carried away doing this, I've learned...

Due to tomato wilt, pests and rookie mistakes I didnt get a great harvest that year. The only successful harvests were a mountain of tomatillos (which we had no idea what to do with so most went to waste) and a buttload of Habanero peppers (which were a pretty bright shiny orange, but made any recipe taste worse).

Heh. Growing stuff you don't like to eat just 'cause you can? Yeah..I can see me doing that.

Successes were tomatoes (10 assorted cherry and grape tomato plants provided regular handfuls of tomatoes, and kept Fatty the Groundhog visiting my deck every day), cucumbers (4 plants giving around a cucumber per day over the summer), Jalapenos (two plants, about 100 peppers picked and popped in freezer bags. Only ate one straight from the plant, it tasted of pain and burning), snow peas (from seeds, got a couple of bowl-fulls out of them), and eggplants (there's still about 10 on the plants, but we're sick of eggplants now). Courgettes just about earned their place after a slow start, and Squash plants were a waste of time (two plants produced 1 squash and about 40 billion squash bugs).

Awesome!

End of July/Beginning of August I tried clearing out some space for a second planting. Spinach, Turnips, Kale, Chard, Collards and Broccili all from seed. It's not worked out well, the previously mentioned NoVa rainy season held things back and then something came onto my deck and bit off all the leaves (maybe a deer, seen them on my deck before). The plants are bouncing back now, resprouting leaves despite squirrels digging in my containers, but first predicted frost is about 10 days away so probably too late. Looks like the second planting will result in no veggies.

I mean, do we *really* need rodents????

Plans for next year are my containers again, plus adding two 12x6 raised garden areas in my back yard below the deck. I thought 2x12x6 was a bit ambitious until reading some of the plans on here.

I guess this is a good time to share my thinking on my general layout for next year--specific plants and locations subject to change, of course.



Dropbox - 2019plan.png

Each cell in Excel represents one square foot of land. The green areas are where I plan to grow stuff. The brown ones are just walkways that will be covered in landscape fabric and mulched over for near-100% weed prevention. (The 3-foot-wide walkway in the middle probably ends up being two feet if you turn me loose in the seed department, though, because I'll want another 30 square feet of growing space when all is said and done. Let's just be honest. ) Note that there are essentially six "rows" where root systems will begin. I intend to lay the drip lines from the rain barrels straight down those rows, and seed/plant in the areas right by the holes in the line, so I don't have to use city water to keep the seeds/seedlings moist in their critical times.