Looking Ahead

There’s really not much time off when gardening in this part of North Carolina. When you’re done growing for one season, you’d better have already made your plans and prepared for the next season. Winter isn’t even immune from this cycle; it’s just a little slower paced. That means, I am already looking ahead to the next growing seasons. Spring planting starts in February/March. Summer planting begins in May.

One of my new trials for next summer is to do a Three Sisters Garden. I’ve never considered doing one before since I don’t eat corn, but when the corn stands started popping up this fall, I thought: “The chickens eat corn, I eat beans and squash, I can do this!”

Since corn takes a lot of growing area, it definitely will not work in my raised beds, so I will have to put the Three Sisters Garden in-ground. To begin preparing an area for planting, we laid a tarp out to kill a section of grass this past weekend.

In late Spring (April maybe?), I plan to plant that area in a cover crop to further prepare the soil. I’m thinking maybe radishes and mustard greens would work nicely to break up the soil and add nutrients and structure to the soil. I’ll look at other possibilities, too, though.

I’m looking forward to learning new things from this experiment.