5 steps to planning your dream garden. (part 1)

It's spring time! In fact this pass Sunday was the first official day of spring! Which means we are all breaking out the seed packets from last year, ordering new seeds and flipping through catalogs to fill up the rows, garden boxes, buckets or whatever your garden method is. I must be honest, as pumped as I am about everything coming up and the farm flourishing (see what I did there?) I am not looking forward to summer, your girl and heat are not friends! Enough blabbering from me let's get to the exciting topic at hand, planning your spring garden. 
Planning your spring garden for the first time or one hundredth time can be majorly overwhelming I like to break it down into 5 simple steps.

1. Dream - Choose your style and layout.
2. Pick what to grow - Choose your crops that work for your lifestyle.
3. Location - location meaning 2 things, find your zone and where your garden will be.
4. Prep the soil - Amending the soil is important, the soil needs to be prepare to feed your plant babies!
5. Get planting! - what are you waiting for? Get those seeds the ground and watch them flourish!

I will be breaking down these  points 2 points per blog post so stay tuned, I am pumped!
When helping my amazing clients plan their garden, I want them to fall in love with the planning process, so we go back to the senior year of high school; we create a vision board. This can be done digitally or you can do it the good old fashioned way with Eimers glue, construction paper and cardboard; oh and you can't forget the scissors! So when planning your vision board you want to think what is my ideal garden, that can practically happen with lifestyle I live. We want to fill the vision board with  the plants we want to grow the setup we want to have, the colors we ant  in our garden and the likes. And we cannot forget the most important part of the  vision board and that is the budget. Yes, I said budgeting ha, welcome to adulthood! But on a serious note budgeting is not that hard in terms of gardening, we want to create the dream garden without breaking the bank. 
Point number 2
          - Pick what to grow - Choose your crops that work for your lifestyle -
Fun story when Izzie first started planning her farm I was 100% sure that I was destined to be a cut flower farmer of all things! But as you can see now I am not a flower farmer, I do grow them on the side though. Why don't I grow flowers? Because they were too high maintenance for my lifestyle. When choosing crops, you want to pick ones that work best for the lifestyle you live. For example, dahlias the cut flower would not be the best option if you work a full time job and are a student they require too much time, however collard greens would be a great option as they are pretty straight forward and low maintenance crop. 
So friends lets get that vision board started, and pick your crops! Don't forget to budget, it's a very important step. 
You can book a consultation with me anytime to help you get a head start on your gardening journey, I am so excited to help you Flor•ish. 

Happy Flor•ishing,
OXO Izzie 

---