Help with garden layout?

I'm attaching some quick screen shots. Located in southern NJ. The Google map photos below appear to be from last October or November as I can see strawbales we have stacked by the house for fall decoration. As shown you can see the shadows cast on the growing area during the end of our growing season. During most of the year (april-september) we have almost zero shading on any of the growing area for 8+ hours a day. Some areas never receive any shade which is brutal in our recent summer weather. It's only may and we have record high 94 degrees forecast for today already.

My wife and I started our raised bed garden this year. We deep mulched the entire area last summer as we will be doing some in ground perennial plantings of fruits, trees, and native nj pollinator friendly visual scaping.

The attached photos show beds marked in red. There are 9 of these beds and are 4'x10' and 2' tall. These beds are already in installed and filled .

We originally orientated these to maximize the number of beds in the space and it looked visually the best to us for curb appeal having them running parallel to the fence vs running the beds exactly north south and having them at an angle to the fence.

This garden is half of our front yard. The house pretty much faces due south and the beds we have in are pointed at 148-150degrees south southeast.

These beds will contain all low growing items for us like herbs, low vege like lettuce and spinach etc, dedicated strawberry beds.

The next row I plan on installing will be for tall vege that requires trellises. Mostly tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas, etc.

We plan on using a vertical string trellis system with the plastic clips. I am going to erect the framing for this system in such a way to allow for installation of future shade cloth of needed in the future as global temperatures and uv levels continue to rise.

The attached screen doodles have blue lines drawn in to represent the trellis beds.

I'm not sure what option would be best. The red beds have 3 ft of space in-between each bed and against our front chain link fence for reference to fit my wheelbarrow.

Unfortunately, due to already setting the the other beds already without thinking of the shadow casting issues of beds with trellises, I feel like I have the three options left for us to pick from.

1) run the beds exactly like the first row of beds with the long dimension running basically southeast to north west

2) run a single row of beds running southwest to northeast.

3) run beds at an angle to the existing beds with the long dimension running north south which would match the upper part of our front walk and be parallel with the gable end wall of our house.


We do plan some edible bushes, trees and ofcourse pollinator landscaping behind this trellises row of raised beds and eventually when our garage gets rebuilt in the next year I'll be having a paver patio installed out front  and a paver walkway installed which will wrap around both sides of the home to connect to a future rear patio.

I'm concerned with bed solar orientation mostly for tomatoes as like many people, it is a crop we consume a lot of.

This is our first garden but I have experience as a child through young adult helping my father at my childhood home with landscape and vegetable garden work so I'm not totally green. I just don't want to have to remove dirt and rotate beds in the future due to poor planning.

What is your climate like? I ask because if it's hot some shading is actually helpful. I grew up in a mild climate where full sun was great. Now in southern Oregon, our summers are so hot and dry, I'm shading everything somewhat.

Well southern NJ is I believe either zone 6-7 depending on location. There's a few isolated areas near the interior of the state that get slightly colder hardiness zoning due to their wide open nature's that expose them to northern winds and their distance from both the deleware river and the Atlantic ocean leave no buffering effect from having the large body of water close by.

It seems every year the summers start earlier in may, run longer through September, are hotter and unfortunately we have humidity during the summer that has rivaled or exceeded some our relative's local weather who live in the Orlando Florida area. The humidity really is something else considering our geographical location.

Our springs used to be wetter I feel but example, since mid April until now I think we've had a total of maybe 1/3"-1/2" of rain. Previous years I'd be mowing the grass three times a week but this year in the prime spring flush weeks the lawn growth was very moderate due to the lack of rain.

Our falls have still gotten relatively consistent moisture and last fall in particular, had relatively fantastic lawn growing weather with 55-65f days and 40's at night well into December but I'd have to check.

The site of our beds definitely is scorching during mid summer (maybe not southwest or Texas hot) but my larger concern is the high humidity we have during summer nights. By July or mid July we have those nights that stay well above 70f and just absolutely stifling humidity levels that feel like a damp armpit when outside.

Last summer we had gotten stuck in a pattern for a few weeks similar to Florida, where the humidity was high in the morning, build higher throughout the day as temps would hit the low 90's and then a small brief afternoon shower followed promptly by a cloudless sky full sun which made outside feel like being in a steamy shower stall.

Bed orientation and spacing for me, especially with tomatoes and their diseases, is somewhat less about getting enough sun but managing local bed humidity, airflow and having enough beds to rotate my tomatoes with the other tall vege to try and keep disease and pests lower.

I would make all the beds identical and rotate everything through all of them. Given your climate, the shading provided by the tall plants should be useful for the small ones. Not having the tall ones all bunched in one row should help with air flow. And being available to rotate everything helps with pest and disease control. I use removable tomato cages, bean trellises etc.

I don't have any experience with high humidity having always lived on the west coast, hopefully others will chime in, but good air flow is always a good thing.

Stacy Witscher wrote:I would make all the beds identical and rotate everything through all of them. Given your climate, the shading provided by the tall plants should be useful for the small ones. Not having the tall ones all bunched in one row should help with air flow. And being available to rotate everything helps with pest and disease control. I use removable tomato cages, bean trellises etc.

I don't have any experience with high humidity having always lived on the west coast, hopefully others will chime in, but good air flow is always a good thing.

Stacy,

The second row of beds will all be setup to trellis. The current set of beds already installed will not.

Mostly because raised beds that are already 25" tall makes it difficult to reach the tops of the taller crops.

The next set of raised beds will be 6-12" in height to help with this.

My full soil analysis from our local college/extension last year indicated we had a relatively decent sandy loam that was just slightly acidic and just slightly light on organic matter so I'm confident that shallower raised beds will work for my application without much trouble.

Does the slightly south east orientation pose a glaring issue for growing tomatoes? If it doesn't I'd like to keep the beds in line with what I already have. These will be less wide, probably 24"-30" wide by 10' long this giving me roughly 5' between rows which should minimize any additional shading by having the bed not exactly due south.

The southeast orientation should be fine.

I agree, tall crops in tall beds creates difficulties in harvesting.

My raised beds are all 12" tall. Most of them are 4'x8'. They were here when I moved in. If I had done it from scratch, I prefer 3' wide beds, my reach isn't that good. But 12" deep has always worked fine.

I think that you are on a good track.

In the real world, how many gardens face cardinal directions? I know solar orientation is important but isn't maximizing the space you have available important as well?

Thanks for the input.