Sorry clodhoppers but I have had a few days away and agree that your garden sounds great. I guess you have also demonstrated that you have to do so much more planning and hardworking compared to us able body types who just plod a row , scatter seed and hope for the best.
Bye the bye - mice have worked their way along my rows of carrots so I have had to harvest and freeze those they left. The rabbits did benefit from half eaten carrots and the tops.
In fact I reckon that had I been starting a garden from scratch on a 40 year old never dug plot full of weeds , brambles and all manner of pest I would have had to work a darn sight harder than I have for the square foot garden .
Now the brick work is done that's it for seven or so years , all I need to do is take one out, add compost and re sow /replant a different group crop. because of the replenishment there is never any nutrient & trace element deficiencies , pests are kept at a minimum there are very few weeds .
At seven years I may add more vermiculite and carry on as before for the bed will have a pan about 18 inches down which only the big lob worms will go through .
I also could excavate a bed ( 9 square feet ) by about 18 inches deep of fill a month at that point and scatter the contents over the lawns as a lawn feed /conditioner and make up some more filling .
Or I might be able to sell it by the bag full as raised bed fill for those who are only using a 6 inch boards as side walls .
The planning was a simple eXcel spread sheet that took me a while to do as I had to learn about eXcel in the first place and then try and remember it .
Once I'd grouped the seeds I had of the veg by brassica , roots legumes and others then used eXcel to put each group in alphabetical order it was a simple case of entering these ordered groups in the index on the left side and copy out across the A3 sheet when to so , plant out and harvest .
This winter I hope to move a bit further in eXcel and actually be able to take a complete line of say " Early nante fly resistant carrots " and be able to select it so it reproduces entirely all events in the 52 weeks that I have made on the A3 plan .
That way I can construct a new planner each year on a mask as easy as pie any crop I want in about an hour .
All my seeds are decanted as soon as I get them and put in air tight containers which are numbered and tied to the planners index number . It took me 2 & 1/2 hours to add new seeds & remove used or way past the use by date seeds on the eXcel sheet in January this year ..
I have a list for seed viabilities which indicates the length of viability of the seed if it's stored in a cool dark dry condition . I use this list when making up the seed container labels and the master seed holding list .
Again the power of eXcel is amazing it's so easy to do and alter once the main mask is made & eXcel work books from it are promogulated .