where do I go from here?

A lot of the planning work has been completed, which feels great. So what's next?

1. Refine the plan - At this point, I think I have as good an idea what to do with each individual plant as I'm going to have before I actually get into it when the spring rolls around. But what about within each individual bed, where there are often different varieties of plants and dates to think about. So my next step is to go through the beds individually and plan out what will happen in that bed throughout next season. This is a way of double-checking that I am using the space well.

2. Greenhouse - I found a greenhouse design earlier, and I have a spot for it in the garden plan. Now I need to build it. Artichokes and leeks need to be started in the greenhouse in mid-January, which is one month away. Yikes! Time to get busy.

3. Organize the seed exchange with the Garden the Avenues group.

4. Get into the seed catalogs and decide on the different varieties I want to grow. I've talked before about Johnny's Seeds, which I will order some seeds and supplies from. But I've now found another source: FedCo Seeds, which looks quite promising. The catalog is quite entertaining and the prices are amazing. So I'll be looking into it pretty soon and putting my orders together.

5. Irrigation. This isn't too urgent right now, but it's time to start planning it out and researching. I'm not going to have time to water everything by hand, so I'll need a good system, probably drip irrigation. I'm sure I'll be writing more about this later.