The Honors Garden Of Earthly Delights

The following design was created by Aaron Zlatkin and James Goldschmidt as one of a number of possible models. Models suggested by students can/might be created in our small groups, or you can feel free to create your own model-plan of the garden. Actually, it's a great exercise in critical thinking and strategy, those of you who find such things challenging will certainly be rewarded (intellectually). It takes some time.

In order to create such a model, you need to know:

  1. the dimensions of the garden, which has now been 'officially' marked off on the soil as 25.5 feet by 40 feet or 7.77 meters x 12.19 meters. This is a total of 1,020 square feet [0.0234 acre] or 94.76 square meters [0.0095 hectare].
  2. all the crops that are to be planted, and the earliest safe planting dates for each in our USDA zone (zone 6)
    ---> now is the time to request more types/varieties of veg that you didn't see on our seed list <---
  3. the amount of time it takes for the plant to mature for harvesting
  4. plant spacing (i.e. about 24" for tomato, 12-18" for peppers, etc.)
  5. we have decided that the raised beds are 3 feet wide with an 18 inch space inbetween
  6. yield of the plant in some cases, e.g., knowing that we don't really need 2 rows of horseradish, since 2 plants will probably be all we need
  7. we made some changes in our design model, one of which was to run the raised beds horizontally. We gained about 7 linear feet of planting space by doing it this way.
25.5 feet x 40 feet : 1,020 sq feet

(towards the woods)


(towards the house)
 summer crops are ringed in this color