Cool Tool

This is a cool tool:
Kitchen Garden Planner

You can plan your square foot garden online and get a printout of the plan, the plants, how many per square, when to plant relative to last frost date (you'll have to find that out and figure out calendar dates from there).

If you click on tabs at the top there are pre-planned gardens for kitchen, herbs, and so on. Or you can pick from something like 47 different vegetables (counting tomatoes and peppers as vegetables) and herbs. You'll know how many starts to buy or start yourself, when to sprout seeds, and so on. Pretty sweet. It's linked to the company that will also sell you seeds and supplies, but you don't have to buy them.

I like the square foot gardening because it's easy AND it's very easy to apply to containers. For a 5gallon bucket, I put in about 75% of the plants that a 1foot square will take (of course, the minimum is one plant). This should be very handy for my how much can you grow in a parking spot test this year. It looks like I can grow as much as I can eat and much much more...well, SOMEONE could grow that much. We'll see how much I get.

I also met a woman yesterday at a conference who has fruit trees in containers!!! I'm very interested in growing lemons. I got one started in a small pot once, but it died due to lack of sun or attention or nutrients or something. Anyway, it died. She claims that if I'm willing to bring the pot in in the winter I can have lemons. Lemon juice is one of my most used condiments and I can't really see doing without it entirely if I try to feed myself from just what I can produce or find or catch or kill. A lime and an avocado would be nice too...then I got to wondering about coffee beans...you never know. Has anyone even tried to grow them here? If I could produce local coffee and cocoa, I'd be rich. Or at least well known in Plummer.

More on the conference later.