New member from eastern PA

Hi, my name is Lisa and I'm so excited to have found this forum!  I got my start by growing tomatoes and cucumbers in my flower beds (pickling cucumbers on trellises).  This year I made the jump to square foot gardening.  Even thought I got off to a slightly later start than I'd hoped, things are looking wonderful so far!  I've been nibbling at the arugula already, and will probably be ready to harvest some greens, and maybe even some radishes this weekend.  I live in east central Pennsylvania, in a place known for its excellent soil and farming.  The many fabulous farms in my area are great inspiration for my little garden patch!

Now that everything is planted and starting to grow, I'm thinking about what I can put in later in the summer.  Especially to replace the lettuce/arugula/spinach/radishes that I'm expecting to not do well in the heat of July and August.  I'm planning to re-plant these in the fall when temperatures cool off again.  I'm also looking to get some good ideas for crops that will do well into the winter.

Here is my garden plan:


Here is a picture of my garden from May:

Welcome!

Do you have any vermiculite in there? Your soil looks oddly uniform in color for an SFG'er. At least from this distance.

If you're planning on planting for winter, a lot of root veggies do well then, and while some cole crops planted in fall can be harvested that season, others can overwinter and start producing extra-early in the spring. If you love spinach and peas as much as I do, they'd be right at the top of the list.

Chard and kale are leafy greens that can keep very well through the winter and even continue to produce, especially if covered. You might want to think about getting some remay and covering your crops during winter to protect them from cool, drying winds and keep them a few degrees warmer.

If you want to plant something right away to still take advantage of the summer, how about direct-sowing some bush beans or bush cucumbers? Both grow quickly, some to maturity in 50 days or so. You could be eating off of them before the end of August if you planted now.

Welcome.  What size is your bed.  Do you realize that you cannot plant spinach, lettuce, snow peas etc at the same time as tomatoes, cucs, peppers etc.  One group is a cool weather crop and one group likes warm weather.

yolos wrote:Welcome.  What size is your bed.  Do you realize that you cannot plant spinach, lettuce, snow peas etc at the same time as tomatoes, cucs, peppers etc.  One group is a cool weather crop and one group likes warm weather.

The bed is 6' x 12' - it can be a stretch to reach the very middle, but I wanted to minimize how much the bed sticks out into my yard, while maximizing the size.

As for planting those things together - as I said, I got a later start than I'd hoped for.  I had planned to get the cold weather crops in earlier, but it just didn't work out that way.  So far the greens have been doing very well.  I'm going to put shade fabric up to try to get a few more weeks out of them.  Then I'm looking for something to put in for the hottest months before returning to the cold crops again.  

I see you're in Georgia - I'm sure it gets to hot for lettuce much sooner down there than it does up here in PA.  Plus we had an absolutely brutal winter this year.  I don't think we even had bare ground until the end of March.  We were just getting the wood frame in the ground around the time I had hoped to be planting the first seeds!

Marc Iverson wrote:Welcome!

Do you have any vermiculite in there?  Your soil looks oddly uniform in color for an SFG'er.  At least from this distance.

No, I don't!  Because of the loooong winter, I was rushing to get the raised bed finished in time to start planting.  As a result I didn't do much research on soil preparation as I had hoped.  It's just the first year for my garden, so I was just happy to get it in at all!  I've already learned a lot here that I'm planning to put into practice next year.

Thanks for the tips!  Maybe I'll put some root vegetables in when the tomatoes and cucumbers are finished.  We tend to prefer chard to kale, so I'm glad to hear that it can keep going when it gets cooler.