Making Garden Plans - January 25, 2025 @goldenoakfarm

Woodpecker on suet feeder

On Saturday morning, I got the post up, made a big cup of tea and sat down to plan the gardens for 2025. I use this website to plan from year to year. It transfers information on where things were planted in previous years. This is a great aid to keeping rotation straight.

Again this year I am making more walkways/distance between rows 3’ wide which lessens the amount I can grow. At this point it’s only near bushy plants not things like carrots. Here’s the plan for the Big garden: as you can publish your plans for others to see.

Next up was the Small garden and that didn’t take very long. Here it is.

I tried to check each online plan against the paper ones for last year but I missed stuff. When I got to the New Herb garden, I decided it would more or less be the same in 2025.

I might swap out annual plants for one another, but wasn’t planning on starting anything new this year. That might change when I start looking through seed catalogs at the end of this process. So here’s the New Herb garden.

I’m going to try putting full size photos of the plans at the end and see how that affects the loading of the post.

So by mid morning I started collecting all the stuff needed to make paper copies. These last far better in the garden and are done in pencil so I can note changes as I go along.

I got the first big one of the Big garden put together (it takes 2 sheets) and started entering stuff and immediately found lots of mistakes. I got it about half done by lunch time and was getting really tired, so I quit.

As I sat at the dining room table I kept seeing flickers out the windows. I knew I saw a chickadee, so I stood there several times to try to capture the chickadee.

The top 2 photos you will have to look closely to see the chickadee in flight. I finally got one on a feeder and then managed a closer photo. These are through the windows so the quality isn’t there. I can’t move much to get a shot, so I take what I can get.

I spent the afternoon on the couch watching Call the Midwife Season 11 and keeping the fires going as it was getting very cold, again.

Here’s the full size photos of the plans:

Big Garden

Small garden

New Herb garden

On Sunday, I plan to finish the paper copies, do the seed inventory (hopefully legibly as all 3 of my helpers are well out of state), and then start making up seed orders. I most probably won’t finish on Sunday.