That would leave you with very narrow planting spaces if you are considering centering each one.

I have a stair-stepped planter parallel to the corner of the eve near my front porch. 6", 12" and 18" height. Maximum 4' width. Parlsey, carrots, echinacea, chard, kale, arugula, peas, ruby moon hyacinth (strung up to the eve) but my favorite to plant there is carrots. Last spring I planted strawberry. Might regret that.

It gets the most attention and has the best dirt. I do hate that I added to my weed eating chores, tho. I dread replenishing the dirt. It doesn't look very good right at the moment, but I love its location. Worth it. I'm thinking about extending its reach.

DH said today I had the design different than he had planned. His plan was a square with a diamond on top then a square so the corners give you kind of individual planters. I'm not sure it is the best use of the footprint, actually. I was picturing a wooden version of an herb spiral. For strawberries, I pictured a stairstep, essentially the same dimensions, but all lined up on one corner, which would then be pointed north so all planting areas get sun during the day. DH and I will no doubt have to argue over it.

Here is a link that might be useful: planting box

The thing I don't like about mine (the 3' stretches) is there are no dividers. I must use bricks or crap pieces of wood to remember the different plantings. I like the individual planters idea. Might help to keep that in mind with your design. I don't plant the same thing every year.

Hey, might I recommend you put a hugel under it? Doesn't need to be very deep. However, it will sink as the soil gives way to the richness. I didn't put reinforcing legs under mine. Just laid the wood down. lol I gotta fix that.

But that hugel below made it drought-proof and natural fertilizer for the first three years. Easy stuff.

pic

Ha, Bon, complicate it more with a hugel, LOL. DH does not understand that concept. Good idea though. A hugel and a worm tower. I just have to figure out a good way to water. Maybe with the hugel it wouldn't need much water. My concern was the top tiers would get too dry. I'm trying to figure out the actual planting area. Then I found one in a hexagon shape...ooo shiney. Maybe I will do the flowers in hexagon shape.

So many ideas! It's fun to plan and dream.

Amy, Just tell him the hugelkultur starts out sort of as a brush pile, but you don't burn it. That's how I explained it to my DH. I built hugelkultur gardens in our Fort Worth garden in the 1980s or 1990s, but didn't know that was what I was doing. It wasn't until the last few years that I read about hugelkultur in a permaculture book and discovered there was a name for the technique I had used in Fort Worth.

I have more trouble with hugels here, though I have used them to fill in and "fix" badly eroded areas. The trouble with them is that voles and snakes like to spend far too much time in the hugelkultur piles than I like. I tend to only sow flower seeds on top of them, so I don't ever have to harvest from those areas and find my hands too close to a snake. The first time I saw a rattlesnake in a hugelkultur bed southwest of the barn was the last time I built a bed like that for about 5 years, though I keep throwing more stuff onto the top of that hugelkultur pile every winter. Nowadays, everywhere that I have built a hugelkulture bed to fix an eroded area, we have reseeding four o'clocks. It makes me happy to see flowers blooming in spots that once were bare, exposed, badly-eroded red clay soil that continued to erode every time we had a hard rain.

Bon, At this time of the year, plans and dreams are pretty much all we have.

It probably is good we live in a climate that forces us to take something of a break from gardening in winter, or we'd exhaust ourselves trying to keep full gardens going year-round. I don't think I could maintain my summer gardening/canning pace year-round. In fact, I am sure that I could not. I love gardening, and miss it when the weather is too cold to grow much of anything outdoors, but I know I need a break from it every now and then.

I've built three new hugelkultur beds north of the barn and haven't decided what I'll put there. Maybe winter squash that I wouldn't have to harvest too often. Maybe just sunflowers or something similar. The ground there is extremely dense, compacted clay and you cannot even break it up with a rear-tine tiller, but the soil desperately needed improvement because of the way it cracks in drought. I decided that since I couldn't improve that area by rototilling organic matter into it, I'd build those hugelkultur beds on top of the surface of the ground and improve it from the top down.

Dawn

DH puts chicken wire in the bottom of the beds. That may not be small enough to exclude either voles or snakes. I feel like hardware cloth would be too expensive for our needs. Of course the dogs keep digging around the yard, what ARE they trying to dig up? (The digger would not expend that much energy unless food was involved.) I had thought about a couple of firewood logs in the bed just to retain water.

DH puts chicken wire in the bottom of the beds. That may not be small enough to exclude either voles or snakes. I feel like hardware cloth would be too expensive for our needs. Of course the dogs keep digging around the yard, what ARE they trying to dig up? (The digger would not expend that much energy unless food was involved.) I had thought about a couple of firewood logs in the bed just to retain water.

Chicken wire doesn't deter many snakes and doesn't deter voles at all. I've seen some of the really big snakes get hung up in it though.

Hardware cloth is very expensive, but the one with 1/4" openings excludes most any rodent and or snakes.

I could live (and do) with non-venomous snakes in the garden, but the snake I most often see in the garden is the timber rattler, commonly referred to as velvet-tails here in our county because of their velvety black rattlers. The venom of the timber rattler is said to be pretty dangerous (I've never been bitten so have no first-hand knowledge of this myself) so I try hard to keep them out of the garden. I wish I could fence in the whole garden with 1/4" hardware cloth, but due to the expense, that's never going to happen. We have woodland on three sizes of us, and not much except woodland between us and the Red River, so timber rattlers are incredibly abundant here.

When we first moved here, I noticed all the ranchers carried guns....in their pickups, even on their ATVs or tractors. I wrongly assumed they were for the killing of skunks, coyotes and such. It didn't take me long to long learn they mainly were for shooting venomous snakes. I knew we'd have snakes here, both venomous and non-venomous, but I greatly underestimated how many we'd encounter, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out.

I wish I had the energy to spend the whole winter digging out every raised bed a couple of feet deep and filling those areas with hugelkultur materials and heaping the improved garden soil on top. It is so hard to dig clay, though, even when it has been amended fairly heavily----it still compacts and a shovelful gets heavy fast. Maybe I could do that to one bed per year, adding the below-ground hugel materials after lining the bed-to-be with hardware cloth. Maybe if I did a couple of year, I'd get them all done before Tim retires.

We have dogs that I think dig merely for amusement---they dig soil, they dig compost, they dig in mulch....dig, dig, dig. I wish I could harness their digging energy and get them to dig out the ground below the raised beds for me. I'm sure if they understood that I wanted them to dig, then they'd absolutely refuse to dig at all.

I think that if you have a good soil-less mix in your pyramid planter boxes, you could get them to hold moisture well enough in the summer heat. I usually add coir to container mixes in order to increase its ability to hold moisture in dry years. I've been surprised by how long I can neglect to water my large containers (molasses feed tubs) in summer, and I suspect it is because I put a mini-hugel in the bottom of each container before adding a good soil-less mix on top. My mini-hugels usually consists of whatever half-rotted logs and limbs I can drag up out of the woods (in winter, when it is too cold to be snakey) and a nice mix of leaf mold, twigs, sticks, bark, etc. I try to recreate the forest floor in my containers. However, I do grow trailing plants around the outer edges of the planters so they can trail down to the ground and shade the sides of the containers from direct sun. I think that helps the planters stay cooler and hold the moisture in the growing medium for longer time periods in between watering. When container walls are exposed to direct sunlight, the growing medium and plant roots can get awfully hot here on summer days.

My favorite container for greens, herbs and dwarf tomato plants is an animal feed trough. Mine is elevated on legs, putting the plants high enough off the ground that the voles cannot jump up into the trough and the rabbits cannot each the plants either. I have to keep deer or bird netting over it sometimes, though, or I'll come outside and have deer lined up eating greens out of the trough.

Dawn

It is nice to have a winter break from the harvesting, canning, freezing, etc., but those climates that don't have a non-growing season don't have a need to preserve the harvest since they can grow it all of the time.

Since they don't have freezes to kill plants (and pests), they don't have the normal die back that creates compost in place so they have shallow soil, and must constantly try to improve the soil. In addition, they may have the kind of heat that depletes compost rapidly, but in the humid climates they can make compost faster than I can. I guess it all works out.

Carol, I think about those kinds of things when I get tired of the cold and try to imagine what it would be like to garden somewhere that is almost always warm.....like some place along the Gulf Coast....close enough to see the ocean. While that sort of weather sounds appealing on a cold day, I think that I'd kinda miss the changing of the seasons. I know I wouldn't actually want to deal with the kind of weather that causes more rapid heat depletion of compost than what we already have here. I already have to work pretty hard to put more organic matter into the soil each year than the heat can deplete...sometimes it feels like a losing battle. I have family on the far northern edge of the Texas hill country, and we thought that gardening there would be a breeze, but even though they warm up quite a bit before we do, they still get those big cold snaps in spring that freeze plants long after their average freeze date would lead one to expect (though not in May like I often see here).

If I could grow only in containers, I would, because I like having more control over the growing medium I put in containers than I get with the clay soil we have. Since it would be cost-prohibitive to buy and fill as many containers as I'd need for my large garden, I find raised beds to be worth the time and effort but it sure takes a lot of time, effort and dollars to improve the clay soil, and I'll never have it where it drains as well as a soil-less growing medium in a container. And, with the new garden we built out west of the barn a couple of years ago, while it has sandy soil in about 70% of it, that brings its own challenges, including nematodes and voles, so growing stuff out in the back garden really isn't any easier than growing it in the front garden with clay and venomous snakes. It is just different challenges.

When we broke that land and fenced it, I never intended to build raised beds back there. After having voles eat the roots of so much of what I grow back there each year, I'm starting to think I'll have to go with raised beds at some point so I can line them with the quarter-inch hardware cloth. With woodland all around, I know we'll never get rid of the voles, so we'll just have to do our best to exclude them. At least we only have voles, and not moles and gophers (knock on wood). There's lots of moles and gophers on the property of people who live near us with nothing but sandy soil, but they don't venture into our clay.

Dawn

Dawn, the first year that I planted the north part of my current garden area was a wet year and I remember a couple of things about it and you may also remember. I had tomato plants that were so waterlogged that I took a garden fork and punched air holes around the plants to try to let air down to the roots. I saved most of them, but some days they were swimming. I remember walking out there one day when it was so muddy that when I tried to take a step, my shoe came off in the mud and I was standing on one leg trying to fish my shoe out. Luckily there was a t-post close enough for me to grab, or I would have been on the ground. LOL After years of leaves, mushroom compost and a little chicken litter I can now walk across it even after rain. We have added more leaves this year than normal, but most are still composting in a pile rather than spread across the garden. One side is covered fairly well and one still needs a lot of work. We have been shocked at how fast the leaves are breaking down this year. We (mostly Al) moved 25 wheelbarrow loads one day, and they were bringing them about as fast as he was moving them out. We haven't had a lot of rain, but lots of light misty stuff so that everything seems to stay damp. We are still about 5 inches below our average rainfall, and a long way from last years totals.

I got the Baker Creek catalog today but haven't had time to look at it.

I haven't ordered any seed from anywhere and haven't even made my Dixondale onion order yet and likely won't have time until after Christmas. I just can't decide how many onions to order this year. I like to order enough to bring the price down, but not so many that I run out of space for other things before the onions come out of the ground. I guess I need to see if anyone else around Grove wants to order with me. I am really anxious to garden this year.

Carol, I do remember that year. It seemed you were ankle deep in mud and water all year.

I think the leaves are breaking down so quickly because we have such a nice combination of warm daytime temperatures (at least down here we do) and all that humidity in the air. I don't remember the last time we had this much fog, sometimes lasting until almost noon, in December. Down here, fog is usually more of an April-May and October type thing.

We remain below average in rainfall as well, although we have had continual drought improvement since June. Part of our county (not my part, lol) is back out of drought and now is only 'Abnormally Dry' but we remain in the 'Moderate Drought' category. I feel like 1-3" would get us out of that category, but the last 2 or 3 times that it has rained, the heavier rain has hit some parts of our county but has missed our part of it. It would be nice to make it totally out of drought for a month or two, but I don't know if it will happen. I sure hope it does. It is discouraging to see how dry the soil is in the raised beds, although the constant fog and mist have kept the top half-inch of mulch kinda moist. It has been perfect conditions for seedlings to sprout in the mulch, or in any bare areas where all the mulch has decomposed or where the digging/scratching of the chickens has kicked it aside.

I haven't even cleaned out all of my garden beds yet because every time I go in there, there's bees, butterflies and birds all over the place and I hate to remove anything that they may be using for food or shelter. If we don't hurry up and get some nice cold weather, the larkspur, bluebonnets, poppies and other seedlings are going to grow too rapidly and then will be green and lush and will freeze back to the ground when it gets very cold again. Most nights we are staying 2 to 5 degrees above freezing. I feel behind, but it seems more important right now to let the little flying creatures have the shelter of the plants still standing in the garden. In January, it will start feeling more important to get the beds ready for planting though.

I haven't received the BCHS catalog yet but when we were in Sam's Club yesterday, they had the 350+-page expanded 2015 edition of "The Whole Seed Catalog" on the magazine rack. Last year, when I saw it in there I said that I was not going to buy the bigger catalog when I get the free one in the mail every year, but then every time I was in there, I wanted to buy it. So, this year, when I saw it I just went ahead and got it. Wait until you see how much they've added this year! There's the usual new offerings in most categories but also a new section of vegetatively-propagated plants like their rare fig collection (3 small plants for $15) and dwarf bananas, and some other rare fruits (most would need to overwinter indoors or in a greenhouse), some perpetual (in frost-free zones, or in a greenhouse that doesn't freeze) spinach and a few ornamentals like some unusual taro/elephant ears and some Louisiana iris.

I am so far behind. Not only have I not been out in the garden working on digging out those raised beds to line them with hardware cloth, but I haven't even ordered seeds. Usually my seeds are all here already and my grow lists are made, and so I feel incredibly far behind right now. I did finally clean out my and reorganize my seed box (who in the world messes it up every year?) last week and made a list of all the viable seeds I have, so I would know precisely what I was starting out with. That will help prevent me from ordering some varieties that I already have. Then, yesterday, I did my main seed order from SESE, and today I hope to do the BCHS order. Then, there's just a couple of odds and ends I need to order that are only available from other places and I'll be ready for the planting season.

I had hoped to start tomato seeds indoors Dec 1st for my own very-early tomato plants instead of buying the early ones that hit the stores here in late January or early February, but my seed-starting shelf is jam-packed with canned goods, so that didn't happen. After I put together all the gift bags with canned goods (I canned approx 800 jars this year, mostly pints except for the roselle jam), that will open up a lot of shelf space again and then I can use my seed-starting light-shelf unit for its intended purpose. I ordered my gift bags, tissue paper and bows yesterday from ULine, and they shipped them from their DFW warehouse yesterday afternoon, so UPS should bring those today. That means I'll be busy with the holiday prep stuff for about a week to ten days, and maybe after that I can start some seeds for the earliest tomato plants.

We have two new rescue puppies, about 12 weeks old, and a new rescue kitten from this past summer, and I have forgotten how hard it is to accomplish anything with baby animals in the house. If our Christmas tree remains standing upright until Christmas, it will be a minor miracle, and I cannot touch the seed crate without having the kitten get into it to sleep on top of the seeds. The puppies have been doing their bit in the garden by digging holes. I need to train them to dig out the raised beds for me.....and then all I'd have to do would be to put in the hardware cloth and refill the beds. We raised up the potato-growing bed and the sweet-potato growing bed to 24" in height when we put the hardware cloth beneath them last year, and this year I want to do the same this year with a longer bed so I can grow carrots, beets and turnips in it without having to worry about the voles eating all the root crops. I like the taller beds as they reduce the amount of stooping required when digging potatoes, but it seems harder to keep the soil moist. With beds which are raised that high above grade level, it is more like container gardening than in-ground gardening.

I have so many garden chores to do, but the usual fall VFD, family and holiday stuff always takes priority. I told Tim the other day that I was excited about late-December, beginning with Dec. 26th. He was totally baffled and said "Why?" and I replied that the local stores immediately begin putting out the freshly-arrived bare root nursery stock, seeds and seed-starting supplies as soon as Christmas is over. How could he even ask why? How could he not know, after 30+ years of marriage, that for me, Spring garden shopping and seed-starting begins the day after Christmas? Other people may hit the stores for the after-Christmas clearance sales, but what I'm in the looking for is the early arrivals of garden center type stuff.

Dawn

I got my Baker Creek catalog yesterday, too. I squealed "SEEDS"! Hubby says "you can read that from clear over there?" I just recognized the cover, LOL. i am surprised I have not gotten more...no SESE...no Peaceful Valley...no pinetree. Can you see my lower lip sticking out? i've got gardening stuff on my Christmas list. If the sun would just keep shining! We are about to go into another week of dreary. Maybe more catalogs will come to cheer me up.

Carol I too wish someone lived close enough to share an order. I will have to put it out on the local FB page. last year I wanted so bad to join the group in OK but it was too far to drive with no heat and cost of gas would have been more than savings. Maybe I will just order myself a boatload and share.
kim