East Aurora Advertiser

Column: The Advertiser Garden: Mapping out in March and Making the Most of Space



As I write this, it finally seems like winter’s hold has started to loosen. My home office sits on the second floor of my home in South Wales, just outside of town and overlooking what is, at the moment, a roaring creek at the edge of the woods whose upper border butts up against Center. Instead of snow covered fields leading up the pond, I’m looking at patches of muddy brown layers of last year’s leaves coming up through what’s left of wet patches of snow. I slept with the windows open last night, and this morning’s rain was a welcome reminder that spring really is right around the corner. Sure, we all know we’re going to get one last shock around St. Patrick’s Day, but garden planning seems more real now than it was a month ago. 

Planning and dreaming of green in January and February has a romanticism to it; it seems poetic, playing with mental pictures of what the summer will look like and imagining something into life while it’s cold and flat and pale outside. March is different. March is when we break out the tools. We begin fine tuning our dreams from last month into a plan. We start large, much like a painter’s broad strokes, and discover all too quickly that you just can’t fit six rows of carrots into a space meant for two (and why did you think six rows of carrots was a good idea, anyway? Clearly, you weren’t thinking straight. It’s okay. WNY winters do that. We’ve all been there.)

We’ve been sharing our ideas for this garden and compiled our staff picks for our patch behind the East Aurora Advertiser office, and comfortably fitting 13 people’s contributions into an 8×8 space has meant some creative planning. We hope that our ideas inspire you to do some concrete planning of your own. 

A good garden map is an essential part of spring planning. Good tools make that task an enjoyable one. Photo by Tami Fuller

Shelly’s arugula and lettuce mean a sweet little salad patch, with herbs for fresh picking. Lettuces dislike heat and tend to bolt once we get past July. I prefer to grow greens like lettuce under a trellis that can provide shade and relief from summer’s heat, extending their growing season. My preferred weapon against bolting? Pole beans. They grow quickly, they are prolific, and choosing pole beans over bush beans means you can maximize not just yield but space in an otherwise small area. Good thing our editor Adam Zaremski voted for beans. Choosing a variety with a nice visual, like rattlesnake, creates a nice aesthetic. Sprinkle in some zinnia for color and cut blooms (they regrow quickly), and you’ve created a corner of the garden that’s efficient, productive and appealing.

Marty Wangelin got excited over growing popcorn, so a few corn plants behind this section will make for good companion planting and room for some small squash to climb. Corn grows better in a grid in a home garden, and beans fix nitrogen, so planting it near beans is always a good idea.

Our Grumpy Publisher Grant Hamilton chose dill, which pairs nicely with Marianne’s choice of cucumbers. We’ll be growing pickling cucumbers against a backdrop of sunflowers and climbing blue morning glory at the corner of the garden that meets our back door. Growing sunflowers with your cucumbers sweetens them, and choosing a small variety like a pickling cuke means the sunflowers can act as a trellis for the lightweight vines, making the most of valuable real estate.

Blue morning glories grow on a trellis in the writer’s garden. Growing climbing flowers and vining vegetablies like cucumber vertically is a good way to maximize valuable garden space. Photo by Tami Fuller

No garden is complete without tomatoes and basil. Three tall basil plants will sit center stage behind Stephanie’s two cherry tomatoes, with Chris’ eggplant framing the front, with French Marigolds and Italian Parsley. Knowing how to use beneficial planting when planning a garden gets in front of possible pest problems, reducing the chances of resorting to desperate measures in the pitch of high summer. It’s a perfect example of an “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” I always include French Marigolds with tomatoes, not just for how they help flavor, but also because I use them to extract ink and natural dye stock.

Jane Sullivan’s sweet peas will trellis with nasturtium, which is edible and can be added as an unexpected spicy element in salads. Jane’s trellis will shade over a bed of spinach and strawberry plants.

Rick’s “Path of Potatoes” will run right down the middle. 

In the right front we have Leslie Wade’s broccoli mixed with my favorite kale mix, which can be used for salads in the early summer and allowed to mature into the fall, framed in by Sandy Cunningham’s brussel sprouts. It’s always a good idea to keep brassicas together, and to not grow them in the same space in the garden two years in a row.

Finally, Sean Cunningham shares my love of beets, but is partial to golden beets over traditional reds. Two rows of beets; one golden and one row of chioggia, will sit behind a row of heirloom french carrots. These carrots grow short and bulbous, good for shallow gardens or pot culture. They also have a shorter growing cycle, so you can enjoy them in the summer rather than waiting for fall. And let’s not forget the radish.

So if you happen to wander past the rear of our office this summer and notice the riot of green vines and overflowing flowers where there used to be a patch of neglected green space, you’ll know what went into our little corner of communal gardening. 

Our Advertiser garden map includes contributions from all of our staff, and makes use of vertical growing, companion planting and trellising to make sure everyone’s favorites are represented in the best use of limited space. Photo by Tami Fuller

A map and a plan is as important to a good garden as a good map is important to a road trip. I prefer graph paper with clear bold lines, a soft drawing pencil, a Pigma Micron 1.0 pen (I am an artist, after all) and a solid ruler. Protractor is optional for those of you who aren’t obsessive compulsive. 

Next step for our garden is seed starting, which begins this week. We’ll catch up on that process in next month’s column.

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This column is a series sharing our progress on the “Advertiser Garden,” an experiment in communal gardening, where we try to turn the small patch of land located outside our rear entrance on Persons Alley into a green space. Progress on our green experiment can be found on our Instagram page, @eastauroranews, along with a monthly update revolving around a related subject, like this one.

Also in this series:

Column: Making the Most of Winter with Spring Planning

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