Annual Beds: Where the Action Really is!

I've written about the perennials I've been putting in, but now I'm going to talk about the set up I've finally got done for the bulk of our garden, the annual beds. First I should probably make sure you know that annuals one live for one year and perennials for many years. Annual crops make up a large portion of what we grow. Things like peas, carrots, potatoes, salad greens, broccoli, melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, ect.

We put in 16 beds to be used for annual crops, this will provide all of our produce needs, aside from the perennials we plants and different tree fruit. This will also be the major labor demands for our garden. Here in California we have about five growing seasons early spring, spring, summer, fall, and through winter. Each season has different crops you can plant in them. This allows for a lot of food to be produced and a lot of different kinds of food. Right now we are squishing our two spring seasons into one, because with my last bit of school I wasn't able to get the beds up as early as I wanted. 

We are doing a no-till system which is nice for setting up a garden, because I don't need to dig anything up or mix the soil at all. We just created slightly raised beds by adding 3 inches of compost directly to the top of the soil where we wanted over beds. The hardest part of this process was just getting the beds measured out. I am so glad I only have to do this once! 

Our beds are 30 inches wide and ten feet long, with three feet of wheelbarrow path in the middle. Two rows of eight beds each. We also added a short fence so my dog doesn't go snacking on my young plants (he likes to graze) and my chickens might think twice before jumping over (probably not). We added some gypsum to the beds before the compost, because our clay soil tend to be lower in calcium and when the calcium and magnesium is in balance clay soil don't clump so tightly.

Then we spread over the compost evenly and pulled out our marking sticks. We added trellises to the beds that needed them and pushed in our signs marking the beds. Since we plan to rotate the beds through seasons of different crops and from year to year, we did not label them by the crop growing within. Which crops are where is recorded in our garden journal, which I keep all my garden records. 

In the next seasons we plan to transplant most of our crops, but with the extra work from school I didn't have time to do that, so many of our crops are direct seeded. The only ones I started in our little greenhouse was some herbs, and tomatoes. Next year there will be a lot more in the greenhouse.