I’ve decided that the time has come — as much as I like the decorative aspects of my current garden design, it has several crucial drawbacks.
This design is based on 6-foot lengths of lumber, so the big square boxes are six feet square, while the triangular beds are all based on six-foot right angles. Here’s the diagram: 
(Sorry about the photo quality.) While I love the decorative aspects of this design, it has several practical drawbacks. The biggest of which is that I can’t reach across the beds. Once I got chickens, I wound up fencing the outside perimeter with copper pipe and plastic mesh — which also has the added benefit of keeping the dogs out of the garden. They were never much of a problem, but it’s just not sanitary — same with the chickens (also, the chickens will devour all the greens in record time). This means that I only have access to these beds from the inside pathway, and I can’t reach the center of either the big squares or the big triangles. In past years, I’ve planted long-season crops like kales at the back or center of these beds, but in general, it’s a problem. Weeds crop up and I can’t get to them, and harvesting is a pain, and so, I wind up with a considerable amount of my limited square footage that is just enough of a pain in the neck to get to that it goes feral.
So last week I went out with the tape measure, and downloaded some graph paper off the internet (handy!). The perimeter is 25′ x 15′ and I decided I wanted plain rectangular beds. After a bunch of noodling around, and consulting with the Builder, I came up with this plain-but-efficient design. The U-shaped beds are 3.5 feet across. My kitchen table is 4 feet square, and I can’t quite reach from one side to the other, so I went with 3.5 for these beds. The long center bed will be 3 x 15 feet, which leaves me enough room to maneuver a wheelbarrow.
The best part, I gain square footage! The old beds totalled 216 square feet, and the new beds total 251.5. The other thing I find exciting is that the long narrow bed in the center should be perfect for hooping, although since everything is rectangular, it will be a lot easier to use hoops not only for season extension, but for protection against pests in the early part of the season (when the flea beetles seem particularly virulent).
It’s supposed to start warming up this week — temps into the 50s– so I’m hoping the ground will thaw out enough that I can begin tearing things up, turning dirt over, and laying down new paths. Will post photos when the actual work begins.
A couple of years ago I blogged about how great 
Here’s my first real harvest — I’ve been eating a little bit out of the hoop houses, some spinach here, a couple of scallions there, some komatsuna as it came in, but this is the first real harvest of the season.
Here’s to give you an idea of the difference the little hoop houses make. Inside each of them all was green and warm and humid. Outside. Well, let’s just note that it snowed a few moments ago. The peas are only just beginning to sprout, I have a few radish seedlings, and some overwintered onions. Other than that, nothing is growing out here in the endless winter we’re having this year in Montana.
Look what came in today’s mail — new seeds! This order is from 
Here’s the overwintered hoop house. The spring greens I planted a month ago are only now starting to sprout — there are teeny tiny seedlings of spinach, bok choi, and arugula in there among the overwintered scallions. I planted seeds a month ago, but I hadn’t expected another bout of subzero weather.
The famous Livingston winds hit last night — up at Choteau, near Glacier, the gauge clocked 114 before it broke into pieces — I don’t know what it was here, but it was the kind of morning where stuff is all over the yard. Among the things that blew askew was the cover that’s been on the hoop house all winter.
We’ve had about ten days of snow and temperatures, sometime daytime as well as nightime, in the single digits. We’ve had over two feet of new snow, which is good, because it insulated my one experimental hoop house where I planted cold-hardy greens. There’s one row each of chard, laccinato kale, bok choi, and arugula, plus I started komatsuna seedlings in mid-October (they’re tiny). I also transplanted a row of scallions between each row of greens, since they’re the one thing I buy most often during the winter.
Here’s what the hoop house looked like before I dug up the edge of the plastic on the far side to take the photo above. I really did not expect anything to be green in there. It was zero or below for three or four days straight. In my past experience, even the most cold-hardy greens succumb at that point. So it was a delightful surprise to find things still looking green and alive in there when I peeled back the cover.
We’ll have to see whether they survive. Everything is green, but the soil is frozen, and so are the bok choi. I cut a few bok choi this morning, as well as some arugula and chard leaves, and managed to pull a couple of scallions. I still don’t know if this is going to work over the course of the whole winter, but so far, things are green, if not necessarily available. The experiment continues ….
Winter has arrived with a bang here in southern Montana. That’s my patio furniture which is suddenly buried.
I don’t dare peek in the hoop house, because it’s supposed to go down below zero tonight, and I’m hoping the snow will insulate. We’ll see if anything survives. It’s slated to run a degree or two either side of zero tonight, and to be even colder tomorrow night. The experiment gets an early test.
Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen.