On Monday we started an experiment called the Caveman Sun Blueprint. The Caveman Sun Blueprint is used to figure out where your garden gets the most sun, shade, and at what times. Shauna got the idea to do this from the book Vertical Vegetable Gardening by Chris McLaughlin.
What we did, was at 9am we drew a diagram of our garden at a birds eye view. Then we looked out the window to see where the sun was hitting the garden, and coloured these parts in with a highlighter. We did this again at 12pm and 3pm on the same paper with different colours of highlighter. Where the different colours overlap are the areas of our garden that get the most sun. We took photos of the blueprint at each stage.
The deck is in the top righthand corner, the rectangles are our garden beds, the squares are apple trees, the circles at the ends of the beds are potato bags, and the circles by the deck are barrels.
We can conclude from this experiment that the four beds at the bottom of the page and the fourth bed down on the left side of the page get the most sunlight and the potato bags really don’t get any sun. We will be repeating this experiment in the spring, summer, and fall.
Will this help you decide on locations for planting different crops? How will this inform your practice?