You may find it hard to believe that we jump right in to planning our Demonstration Garden the first week of the new year, but we do! This allows us plenty of time to plan, order seeds, start seeds, and get everything growing in the garden in a timely fashion.

Our Master Gardener Demonstration Garden committee met this past Tuesday to start the planning process and decide what the themes are going to be for our garden beds this year. We always have fun thinking about new things we could try growing.

Here is our overall garden plan for the 2016 garden:

Bed 1: Peppers are the Herb of the Year, so we will be showcasing a wide variety of peppers this year. We will also do some leafy greens in the spring and fall in a “quilt block” pattern.

Bed 2: There are so many new purple vegetables, herbs, and other edibles that we thought it would be fun to do an all purple garden.

Bed 3: Tomatoes! We don’t know yet what we will showcase, just that there will be tomatoes.

Bed 4: We will be featuring some Oriental vegetables that can be grown successfully in Kansas – some common, others not so much.

Bed 5: Our popular herbs & pollinator flowers garden will be moved to Bed 5 for this year.

Bed 6: Root vegetables – some old favorites, but also possibly some less- common roots.

Bed 7: Grape vine and thymes

Bed 8: Perennial herbs

Bed 9: We thought it might be fun to try Hops in advance of 2019 when it is Herb of the Year.

Bed 10: Plants from the Zingiberaceae (Ginger) family, such as ginger, cardamom, galangal, turmeric, etc.

Accessible Garden/Containers: We are going to feature some of the new “compact” or container-type tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and more. We may also try out a new salad table design from our Hort Therapy committee and make a “pallet” garden like those that have been so popular on Pinterest and Facebook last year.

As you can see, we have some exciting things coming your way this summer, so stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks!