Planning a Party from the garden to the Dish

My friend and I are each having parties on or near the Summer Solstice, and she asked me to grow a row of food for her and tell her what will be ready. So, I had to start looking at my garden in terms of when I want to eat the plants, when they will be finished producing, and what I will put there next. I look at the maturation date on the seed packet then count backwards from the party. That is when I plant the seeds...

So, spinach will be ready between 30 & 60 days depending on the weather and how big you like to eat it- so Solstice party is going to have spinach dishes. We may have peas still going and we will have chard, kale, broccoli, small tender beans and squashes and blossoms going, etc. It has been a fun way to look at home garden food production. Planning never has anything to do with reality some years, though...

The resources I used for planning are: Seattle Tilth's Maritime Northwest Garden Guide by Seattle Tilth, THE organic gardening resource in Seattle, The Square Foot Garden by Mel Bartholameu, combined with Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades by Steve Solomon are great resources for this exercise. Although Sq/Ft suggests cramming the veggies together, decide how many you will grow/use while they are in season, and then timing the harvest, and GVWC wants you to space out the plantings so you don't have to water so much and the roots don't compete with each other- both rely on fertilizing, turning the space as quickly as possible into the next crop, and weeding out all the other plants that grow nearby. I have to just take it all with a grain of salt and just trust that if I can find the vegetables in the weeds, it is a good day after reading The One-straw Revolution: Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka , a manual and biography about a cool farmer from Japan who never weeded or pruned anything in his garden, and planted his rice with "weeds" to nourish the land during the off season, and did not plow or flood his rice fields in the 1930's (which made him a complete freak farmer in those days)! He would plant his fields by putting together mud and seeds (all kinds) and throwing them into the field- they look like clay marbles. When they grew, he knew that the conditions were favorable for those plants, kind of like planting volunteers... he would send his interns out to forage for edibles each night.