If you’re new to the scene here at NN, you may not know that when it comes to my garden, I’m a novice gardener with professional expectations.

Last year was my first year to have my (our) own garden. I pretty much grabbed the tools from my in-laws garage and went to work. No planning. No strategery. Just full out manual labor. Click here if you don’t remember. There were a few problems with our garden last year that ended in disappointment. Here are some things I learned:

• Trees above the plot, even though they look bare when you plant, they will grow full in summer and totally block ALL of the sun from the vegetables.
• When planting the seeds, don’t assume that the directions on the back for spacing the seeds out are just suggestions and that they don’t possibly need all that space for one little seed…. Remember that seeds grow into full blown plants. Full blown plants need a lot of space.
• Weeding. Apparently you need to stay up on pulling the weeds in your garden or else they take over. No matter how many times J told me this, I never really seemed to believe him… until it happened.
• Plants that say they need full sun, really do need full sun.

So I’ve decided to learn from my mistakes this year and work together with J to make it the best garden yet. Oh, I didn’t tell you. J is like a MASTER at groundskeeping and knows like everything there is to know about soil, planting, weeding, etc. I was just too bone-headed and stubborn last year to take him up on his offer to help.

Not this year. Nope. Nuh-uh.

I’ve already picked his brain.

The most important part of starting a summer garden is planning.

Let me repeat: the most important part of starting a summer garden is planning.

Planning what you want to plant, where you want to plant it, how far apart they should be, where to put them according to the light that they get, thinking ahead on how you’re going to keep critters out, whether or not you will be going organic, when you will be putting them in the ground, when you want to start them indoors, etc.

If you’re a visual person like me, then map it out on a piece of paper. Here’s ours…

We decided to go ahead and plant our herbs in the ground (yes, I realize that it’s really early)…. but we just love our baby herbs…

I do not claim to be a Martha Stewart WHAT SO EVER…. these are just a few things that I’ve been thinking about as I have friends who are talking about starting their own gardens and I wanted to share my thoughts.We all kind of learn from one another. One day, I hope the be as good of a gardener as my grandpa was…. now there was a master gardener!