Plans for July 1-15th planting...

We have 3 major points to hit in the next two weeks. (Everyone was supposed to have 10$ to me by today, btw... but I only have mine so far.)

• mulch: We have a big problem with erosion and water retention, especially in our side garden. We decided at our meeting to mulch this area first, about 2-3 inches deep. We'll probably mulch the rest of the garden eventually (hopefully even the containers) but, due to being broke-ass hippies, we're going to start slow.
• compost: Our new planting area (the fence garden, as we call it) needs its soil amended to help our yummy food grow. We didn't do much towards this on our first set of gardens but want to improve our gardening awesomeness with each new step. We'll be buying enough compost to make some compost tea to spread over all the gardens and then hopefully have some of the raw stuff to mix in with out 'compost' from the pile behind the shed.
  
• planting:
• First... the fence garden (NEW!) will have eggplant, carrots, radish, marigolds, pole beans, roma tomatoes (to make into tomato paste) and some random herbs and flowers.
  
• Second... across the driveway, in our side garden, we won't be changing much. But we have a few tomato plants that aren't going to make it (oddly, the ones that are actually producing fruit). So it may behoove us to buy a few new tomatoes to replace them with. Also, a few more marigolds and a couple new bell pepper plants to fill the holes in the garden would help. We also need to take out the cilantro down the center row and plant parsley.
• Third... and finally... the front garden gets a makeover. The row of cucumbers will stay as is, but we'll pull out our bean plants to make room for MORE CUCUMBERS! In the empty space up front (which was supposed to have Brussels sprouts) we are going to plant squash plants (zukes, yellow squash, and one other variety). [The confusing drawing in the bottom right-hand corner diagrams how we plan to plant the cukes, and maybe the squashes. It's a fairly hard-to-draw recommendation by the lovely gardeners at Redenta's, one of our local gardenries. It will be explained via pictures when we actually do it. ;) ]

Yum!