Garden planning / shade study

[jacksonvasey]

I've struggled in past years with finding a good place on my property to grow a garden.  This is pretty much due to the trees growing on the back side of my house, as well as across the street.

So this year I threw together a SketchUp model of my property, and added some towering block geometry to simulate the tree lines, and then did a shadow study using the Shadow tool in SketchUp.

I followed the directions here:
http://kjzhang.freehostia.com/sketchup_shadow_study_tutorial.html

and assembled the time series pictures using Visio instead of PhotoShop.

It was nice having this data, and being able to play around with it at different times of year to see how different spots look through the summer.  I can definitely say I picked the best spot, given the limited options I had.

[forummm]

Interesting. Neat! What are you going to plant?

[deborah]

Thanks very much for the URL. Shadow is something I am troubled by with my vegetable planting. However, I realised that though it is a problem in autumn and winter, it isn't really that much of a problem in summer because we are relatively close to the equator, so the sun shines overhead for a reasonable part of the day in summer.

[PurpleEi]

My garden patch is currently getting about half an hour of sun a day (the horror!). However the wall next to it gets a decent amount, so I strung up a mylar emergency blanket along it as a reflector, and voila! It now gets about 3 extra hours of sun a day.

I'll have to take it down for summer so the plants don't fry, but it's good for winter.

[jacksonvasey]

I read somewhere it would be best to just plant things I like, and not to worry about whether or not it was overly cost-effective. I already planted some corn, green beans, peas, and carrots in the spot I marked, and they're working out pretty well.  I planted those from seed, and they've done well.  On a whim, I planted a single potato that had sprouted eyes and now have a 4 foot high tower of 6 potato plants.

Instead of building up the tower with wood, I cut and split some wood from an unidentified conifer tree I dropped earlier in the spring.