Last weekend our next-door neighbours offered the use of their vegetable garden for this year as their house is for sale, and they want a break from the vegetables. So I planted a mix of things that would mature quickly (in case the house is sold, and there are new people soon) and some longer term crops (partly as a control for my own progress once I get our garden in and also in case the house doesn’t sell quickly, we may as well benefit from corn, pumpkins, and pole beans.)

One end of the bed is a three sisters area planted as described in Great Garden Companions: three corn & pole bean hills on either side of three pumpkin plants. I also planted wide rows of peas, beans, swiss chard, turnip, carrots, radish, summer savory, dill, lettuce, cucumber, zucchini, and more pumpkins.

The bonus is, that they already have enough soaker hose to cover the entire bed, so all I needed was a new watering timer to water. (It is currently set to go on at 11pm for an hour so as not to put too much of a drain on the well.) There are also two rain barrels installed that I could water from a watering can.

Today I went over to install the watering timer and noted that there were many sprouts. Notwithstanding that some of them are clearly volunteers from compost (“hey, I didn’t put any squash there…”) many of the plantings are up. This is pretty impressive as it has been very dry, and very hot and the bed received only one watering last week.

I’m very happy to have something in the ground and sprouting, even if it isn’t on my own land!

Oh, and as a bonus, they also offered to lend me their tomato cages for the season once my tomatoes are hardened off and ready to go into my own garden. :D