One of my absolute favorite things for the new year is getting to plan the new garden layout.
In the fall when I’m cleaning everything up in the garden, I always have the urge to start planning next year‘s garden. I have lots of ideas about how to improve things or how to change things and I want to just sit down and put all of those things into place in the new layout.
However, I force myself just to make a list of the things that I wanna do differently and wait until it is well into winter before I start planning. I like to do it this way because then this gives me something to do during winter when there’s significantly less gardening work available for me.
Plus this is usually the point of year where spring fever is kicking in. I’m desperate to work outside and in the garden but I know I can’t. There is often several feet of snow out well into March.
So when I’m starting to get irritated with the lack of sunlight and warmer temperatures I break out the garden planner.
There are lots of different ways to plan your garden. My grandparents who taught me almost everything I know about gardening still use paper and pencil to plan their garden every year. I’ve seen some people use pre-made worksheets. I’ve seen some people use Excel documents. And there are lots of digital planning products available as well.
I’ve used many different methods myself. When I was first gardening on my own and I had a small garden area I did use just a pencil and paper like my grandparents. I didn’t have a lot to work with or figure out so it was simple and straightforward.
When my garden got a little bigger and I got a little older, there was more technology available for me. I started doing digital models, but it was still sketched by hand.
Now that I’ve expanded my garden up to 2000 square feet. I need more time to spend on actually planning what vegetables and fruits are gonna go on what location and not rescheduling the layout over and over so a couple years ago I switched over to a garden planning app.
Like I said there’s lots of options in apps and web pages for garden planning. I use the Garden Planner by The Old Farmers Almanac. The yearly subscription to the service is not very expensive. It’s currently I believe $33 for the entire year. You can make new layouts based on past years and it will help guide you in what type of crop rotation you need to do. It can help with square foot gardening measurements. It also have a lot of nice features that takes out some of the math and trying to recall on past documents what you’ve done especially if you’re working with a four-year rotation cycle sometimes it’s hard to remember just on the top of your head, what you did three years ago to know what to put in for year four.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what program or method you use as long as you are consciously planning what you’re putting into the garden and where to be most successful and that you’re keeping record of what you’ve done in the past that way, you don’t repeat mistake mistakes, and you can work with crop rotation appropriately.
What to consider while I’m planning?
- Plants Needs
What you’re looking to do with planning is to make sure that your plants are in a place where they are going to get everything they need in terms of water, nutrients, and sunlight.
There’s lots of ways you can verify this information. The information is usually on the seed packets if you’re purchasing seeds. You can get books about gardening that will walk you through what’s needed for the most popular types of vegetables or fruit in a garden. You can also just do a simple Google search.
Then depending on works what works best for your area and your availability to care for the garden you can either group plant so put all the plants who have the same type of needs in the same area or you can companion plant where oftentimes one plant has different needs than the other so that there’s less competition for growing.
I’ve seen both of these methods work so it’s really up to you on which one you’re working with. For example, if you’re working with really limited space and you only have 10 or 15 feet of gardening space you’re going to have less options about where things go so you might end up with some plants that are in some more competition with each other but also in larger areas sometimes grouping plants by need is nice because then when you’re doing things like fertilizing or watering, it’s easy to just focus on this area needs this much water this much fertilizer and you know that other areas don’t need as much.
- Structures
Garden planning is also a time where you can think about what type of structures you might need in your garden. If you have very limited space you might wanna do a lot of trellising which is growing the plants vertically up a support system so that you have more available ground to plant other plants as well.
If you’re going to grow things vertically, then you might have to consider a different layout in order to make sure that the vertical plants don’t create a shade problem for other vegetables that require full sun. In the same turn, sometimes trolling plants gives you an opportunity to grow plants that require more shade and cooler temperatures longer into the season than you normally would because those trellis plants will create that shade effect.
- Garden Direction and Weather
When you’re picking where to put your garden or where to plant certain plants, you can also consider the cardinal directions. Typically you’ll find a lot of information on the internet that says south facing gardens will do better than north facing gardens because they get the most amount of sunlight for the longest time during the year. However, you might be limited in your area about where your garden can go or fit, so you might have to figure out how to make things work best for you with what you have.
This might also not apply to you based on what geographical region you live in. The further north you live, the more south facing the garden is going to be beneficial for you. You want that extended . If you live further down south where your summers are incredibly hot, and the sunlight is more intense than a north-facing garden and might actually be more beneficial since it would help you save water and plants wouldn’t burn.
You also wanna think about wind direction and how the wind travels in your area. Where I live we get quite intense wind storms that are often 60+mph for days at a time. This wind comes directly from the south. So I like to plan my garden, which is a south facing garden with a lot of support built in for the plants in the form of either a man-made structure like tomato cages, or with other plants that are stronger to shield the weaker plants.
You also want to consider the weather, if there are other types of extreme weather you face there might be more delicate plants you want to avoid planting. If you live in a place that gets a lot of rain all year then you want to avoid plants that will rot with too much water. If you live in a really dry climate as I do, then you want plants that are going to be able to thrive in a dry climate and don’t need as much water.
- Your Needs and Wants
If you’re growing plants, just because you enjoy gardening and you enjoy some fresh vegetables and fruit during the summer months then you might be open to trying more varieties of plants and you might be less concerned with the quantity that you’re growing.
Other people, while still enjoying the gardening process, rely on growing a certain amount of food to feed themselves in their families in order to save money at the grocery store. A lot of people who are in this situation plan on saving some of this food to have during the fall and winter and early spring months as well. Which oftentimes means that instead of growing a lot of experimental varieties of a whole bunch of different types of plants usually focus on the things that you know will do well and that your family in particular enjoys.
I have another article that talks about how much food to grow per person in order to save food for the entire year. If that’s something you need to focus on. You can also use that same article to plan what you want just for the season of growing so if you don’t plan on storing any of the food, you can just cut those numbers in half and that is usually the amount you need just to get you through the summer and fall harvest.
You also don’t wanna be growing food that you won’t eat. If there’s a fruit or vegetable that you really hate, I wouldn’t recommend trying to grow it. Instead, focus on things that you really enjoy, for example, in my family, both personal and extended, we love tomatoes. We eat a ton of fresh tomatoes, all season, and we like to have enough to store for the winter as well. So when I’m planning my garden, I know that tomatoes are going to be a very large feature and often get the first priority when I’m planning because of how many plants I grow. Tomatoes need a lot of space to grow well and I’m often growing 20 to 25 plants just for my household. This sometimes does mean that when I’m planning my garden something else has to get sacrificed and doesn’t get to grow or I don’t get to grow as many in order to make sure that I have the tomatoes that I want.
So consider the things that you eat and how much you enjoy it. So as you look through the article about how much to grow per person remember that that’s the amount that the average person consumes, but you may under consume or over consume in a particular category and therefore need to plant less or more to still meet your needs and that that’s perfectly ok.
- Movability
Another thing that you make sure you consider when you’re planning your garden are the pathways. You want to make sure you have the space for watering and harvesting. This can be a little bit of different things for different people.
If you are doing raised garden beds, you wanna make sure that you can reach across the entire bed or if you can access it from multiple sides you need to be able to reach at least halfway across from each side. If you’re sewing directly in the ground, you might need more walkways in order to access all of the plants without stepping on destroying plants in the process. If you have mobility issues, you can still garden. You just might need to consider a larger walkway in order to better support your needs.
A lot of people recommend that for walkways you have them set at least 2 feet wide. And this works pretty well if you’re planning on walking through the garden, but if you need to do a lot of kneeling in the garden or if you’re gardening with mobility aids, you might need a wider space.
It gets kind of uncomfortable to be kneeling in only a 2 foot section so maybe three or more feet is more comfortable.
Also consider what kind of tools you might need to bring into that space so if you need to be bringing materials to your garden in something like a wheelbarrow or a small wagon, you wanna make sure that your pathways are wide enough to accommodate those tools as well. Because my garden is so large and so directly in the ground, I spend a lot more time kneeling in the garden than I do standing so I like a little bit of a wider walkway. I have about 2 1/2 feet in my small walkways. And my one big main walkway right down through the middle of the garden is 3 1/2 feet to be able to accommodate any of the tools and the wheelbarrow that I use.
- When your growing season starts.
You want to make sure that you’re planning with enough advance that you are ready before it’s time to plant. The larger the garden space you have the more time you’ll need to plan.
Now this time will fluctuate depending on where you live geographically and it will depend on if you plan on starting your own seeds or if you plan on purchasing already started plants from a nursery center. If you wanna start something from seed, you need to know how many plants you need and where they’re going to go before you can start sewing seats and you begin sewing your own seeds indoors, often times 6 to 8 weeks before the actual growing season outside.
So if in your area, typically you start putting plants in the ground in mid May you often need to be sowing seeds indoors in mid to late March, which means you’re planning needs to be done well before then. If you’re somebody who is going to be using pre-started plants from a nursery then you have a little bit more time to work with.
If you’re planning on putting plants in the ground in mid May, you would have all the way till the start of May to be able to finish your garden planning and then you can run out to the nursery, get what you need, and start planting.
I do a mix of sowing seeds indoors, planting pre-grown plants from a nursery and sowing seeds directly outdoors. I like to have my garden planning completely done and finalized by the beginning of March. For my geographical area that gives me plenty of time to know what I need to grow from seeds in the house, what I need to start looking for at nurseries and it gives me plenty of time to prep the garden and work on building any new structures or layouts before planting begins.
Ultimately, the key to gardening is to get started. Pick a plan and commit to it. Then as your growing season progresses you can keep notes and keep track of what is working well and what’s not and then further improve the garden each and every year. Don’t be discouraged when things don’t work out exactly as you had hoped, even the most experienced gardeners face failures, and sometimes those failures are based on things that we can’t control. Four years ago we had snow at the end of June and two years ago, we had a massive quarter sized hail storm that lasted almost an hour. Both of these events are things that I couldn’t have predicted or controlled and ultimately led to some failures in the garden, but even through these events, I wouldn’t give up gardening.
–The Busiest Bee Garden