Always wanted to be a teacher!
I was a mad gardener for quite a few years before I got into vegetable gardening properly but once I did, I was very influenced by those wonderful (mostly lady) gardeners of Britain. Going right back to my favourite Gertrude Jekyll, then Vita Sackville West, Rosemary Verey - and even Martha Stewart! I loved the idea of bringing beauty and design to the vegetable patch as well.
So once I started playing around with the design and created my first classic raised garden bed, based on the monastic garden model (the roots of all of the above designs) I started to encounter a bit of a problem. First of all , I didn’t really know what to plant where and when, nor did I know who liked to be grouped together. In fact, I realised that just life in real life, some (plant) family members did not like to hang out with other family members! And to top it off, the more I researched, the more I realised that different plants liked different growing conditions. I could never remember what went where let alone remember what I had planted in each bed the year before.
This was about the same time that I had coined the term “The Professional Countrywoman”which come out of that time when I had left working to raise a family and discovered my passion for creating beautiful spaces in the home and the garden. But I was pretty messy and disorganised about all of it. I was tripping over gumboots on the verandah, being accosted by the pet lambs wanting to be fed, yelling at the chooks to get out of the garden. while I was trying to hang out the washing. I was totally inspired by a quote by Martha Stewart that I read early on in her career, that her mission was to create “beauty and order in a disordered world”. I really wanted that - so I took that mission too. Beginning with myself.
The house we built and garden we created in our 20s!
So over the intervening years between then and now, a generation later, I have learned a lot along the way. I really believe that being organised and adding a bit of planning is the first way to begin to reduce stress in your life. And being organised means creating and using SYSTEMS.
So I brought that approach to the vegetable garden. I research all of the vegetables, their cultivations requirements, their planting times, where they originated from and all the things about them, and encoded that into what has become known as the Crop Rotation Poster. And because I think useful things are also beautiful, I made sure it was beautiful enough to be framed up and hung on the wall - even if it’s in your potting shed. Or maybe your She Shed. But it’s not just a pretty poster. It can tell you want to plant in each of your beds, following the bed crop rotation system, when and then how to prepare the bed for the next rotation and so on.
If you are a beginner gardener and have no idea where to start, then this is a great tool to start out. You can copy the design if you want but you don’t have to. The principles will work whether you have raised beds or not. Just match this to what you have available. If you just have an in-bed rectangle garden bed, divide it into 4 and rotate around that. And of course, there are always many ways to do things and I am not saying this is the only way to create a vegetable garden. But if you are starting out or just want to not have to work it all out for yourself, then this is a great starting point.
So that’s how that came about. I designed it first for myself, then to share with others who were similarly overwhelmed by all the information out there. Here’s some of the people it works best for.
Great gift for beginner gardeners to get started
A great gift for yourself to keep track of your garden
A great gift for ladies (like me) who like to have a beautiful framed garden plan on the wall.
I also updated this a couple of years ago and took all mention of months and replaced with seasons instead. I was getting enquiries from the Northern Hemisphere where it would be opposite to us. So you can use it wherever you are in the world. It also comes along with a wrapper that gives you some directions in using including how to identify the seasons where you live and how they match the seasons in the poster. I’ll include that when I send it out.
The other update I have done is to create a digital version. I did this because postage has gone up quite a lot and that can put some people off. I have made it a flat rate for New Zealand wide customers now. But there is also the option of downloading a printable pdf that you can take to your local printer and get printed out. It is designed to be printed in A2 size and best to choose a cream coloured good quality paper.
To buy your copy click the button and this will take you to the store. I will also keep in touch with monthly updates on what’s happening in the vegetable garden just to keep you up to date. Happy Gardening!