Breaking Down Our Approach to Backyard Garden Design in 2018

Basic garden design to get us started. Image by author.

February was a good month for 2018 backyard garden design planning at our house. From ordering vegetable and fruit seeds to creating a basic blueprint for our future plants’ homes in the yard, Cameron and I have called upon our past gardening knowledge and specific understanding of high-altitude gardening to up our garden game this year.

After a couple of weeks of leafing through seed catalogs, we narrowed our seed list to a good variety of seeds that need to be started indoors for our climate as well as seeds that can be direct sowed when the soil warms up in our yard. This year’s seeds come from our trusty standby, Colorado-based Botanical Interests, as well as West Coast favorite, Oregon-based Territorial Seed Company, and Northeast powerhouse, Vermont-based High Mowing Organic Seeds.

We now have a decent understanding of the microclimates in our yard and will be attempting to grow more delicate veggies in well-mulched, partly shaded areas to reduce the chance that the sun will scorch leaves.

We have standbys like lettuces and dark, leafy greens and experiments like okra and edamame soy beans, and we’re gearing up for a growing season that will hopefully yield enough food that we can ferment, can, and freeze excess for the bright, cold winters well-known to us now.

2018 seeds. Not included are the flower seeds we’ll attempt to start indoors. Image by author.

As parents to a toddler whirlwind, we’re often juggling our day-to-day obligations with our never-ending list of domestic projects, but over the past few weeks, we cobbled together enough time to not only make a portable cold frame to go over part of a garden bed to start lettuce, peas, and collards in the coming week (this was mostly Cameron, DIY woodworking extraordinaire).

We also managed to start our heat-loving vegetable and flower seeds indoors with a relatively low-maintenance grow light operation in the basement. Both of these projects allow Colorado (or any cold-climate) gardeners the opportunity to actually start their garden masterpieces from seed, rather than rely on the more expensive and often less diverse seedlings on offer at most garden stores.

I’ll be sharing more details about how to build your own cold frame and how to set up a snazzy basement seed starting operation this month.