Garden Planning

Our planning clipboards in action. Photo Pam Dawling

Garden Planning

This is the easiest time of year for many of us to plan next year’s garden. If you are in a hot climate zone, or the southern hemisphere, come back to this in six months!

The advantages of good planning are:

  • Make the most productive use of your land.
  • Use the growing season to do the planting and harvesting, without stopping to do calculations
  • Pace yourself, enjoy your life!
  • Reduce stress and confusion
  • Become a better farmer – keep good records, learn from the experience.
  • Invest in your future – Planning gets easier each year – just tweak last year’s plan.
  • For commercial growers, good planning helps you earn a good income.

Design a planning and recordkeeping system you like, so you’ll use it. There are web-based tools, spreadsheets, worksheets and notebooks. Do you prefer clipboards, computers, or photos? Build in the ability to adapt the plan if conditions change.

Web-based systems like AgSquared, COG-Pro and the smaller-scale Gardenplanner.southernexposure.com and  phone apps store a lot of information and let you make changes, which automatically transfer to other pages. But how good is your broadband service?  Could you reliably enter and retrieve information when you need it? We often have outages, and this would be just too frustrating.

We use a lot of spreadsheets. You can make your own, or copy others. During the year we follow printed sheets on clipboards – we don’t often need the computer. The program does all the calculations. You can quickly sort out selected parts of the information and rearrange it. You can print out the sheets and hang them on clipboards for daily use.

Some people use worksheets – printed pages to provide the plan and for you to enter what you do. For the computer-averse, these are good, but leave you to do the arithmetic.

Screenshot Crop Planning Cycle

The farming or gardening year is a cycle, with no beginning and no end. You can start doing better planning at any time of year, busting into the circle diagram below at any point, although I do recommend clarifying your goals before making any big changes. But the slowest season does offer the most time, and a natural break in the crops. Gather your records and notes, your seed catalogs, your maps, and all the schedules and spreadsheets you used this past year.

0. First, clarify your goals. Don’t plan a garden that is designed for someone else.

  1. The Money: If you are growing vegetables to earn a living, calculate how much money you need to support your household, and your farm.
  2. Markets: Figure how best to do that with the land and labor you have available. A CSA? Farmer’s market? Roadside stand? Restaurant sales? You’ll need an idea of prices, so do some research!
  3. Crops: Then decide which crops to grow. Choose vegetables based on demand balanced with the financial value of those crops and the practicalities of growing in your climate, with the land you have use of. I have written before about our process for deciding which crops to grow. Consider ease of growing, suitability for your farm, productivity, profitability, popularity. Provide critical mass for the whole season and a diversity of crops. Honor your crop rotation!
  4. Harvest Schedule: You might be surprised that it is recommended to next determine how much of which crop you want to harvest when. In other words, plan your Harvest Schedule before planning any planting schedules. List how much of each crop to have ready for harvest each week
  5. Planting quantities: Also calculate (from yield tables such as in Sustainable Market Farming) how much you need to plant to achieve your harvest goals. The average person eats 160-200 pounds of fresh vegetables per year (USDA); the average CSA share feeds 2 or 3 people; an annual share will need to include about 500 pounds of 40-50 different vegetables, distributed, say, once a week for 8 months and once a month for 4 months.

Add about 10%, perhaps, to allow for things not going as planned. This could lead to a surplus of some crops, which you might be able to substitute for the shortages. Consider crop spacings, as these will determine how much space each crop needs.

6. Field Planting Schedule: Next, calculate the planting dates that will lead to harvests on your desired dates. Pause to look at the work flow and reconsider if you have too much work in any given week, and if you could make a change to avoid that problem. Take into account Days to Maturity of the varieties you plan to grow, any slowing down or speeding up because of temperatures very different from the ideal spring temperatures the catalog writers had in mind when they came up with those numbers. Draw up your list of outdoor planting dates, along with varieties, row feet, spacing, notes and space to write down what you actually do.OPS

7. Seedlings Schedule: Decide which crops to direct sow and which to transplant. For all the crops you will transplant, prepare a schedule for growing the seedlings. Pause to make sure your growing space can accommodate the numbers of flats and pots you hope to grow.Seedlings Schedule

    1. Pros of direct seeding
      • Less work than transplanting
      • Less money compared to buying starts
      • No need for a greenhouse and equipment
      • Better drought tolerance – roots grow without damage
      • Some crops don’t transplant easily
      • Some crops have millions of plants! (Carrots)
    2. Cons of direct seeding
      • Uses more seed
      • Uses more time thinning
      • Occupies the land longer
      • Maybe harder to get started in cold (or hot) conditions
    3. Pros of transplanting
      • Start earlier than outside, get earlier harvests
      • Start seed in more ideal conditions in greenhouse, better germination, more fun!
      • Easier to care for new seedlings in a greenhouse
      • Protected plants grow quicker
      • Select sturdiest plants, compost the rest
      • More flexibility if weather turns bad. Plants still grow!
      • Fit more crops into the season
      • Use time windows for quick cover crops
      • Save on seed costs
    4. Cons of transplanting
      1. Extra time caring for the starts
      2. Transplant shock can delay harvest

More attention needed to watering new plants

8. Maps: Make scale maps and fill in the main crops to grow in each section, in keeping with your crop rotation. Fit the lesser crops in the spaces left.Map

9. Packing more in: If you want more than your space allows for, (including wanting to pack your crops in a smaller space, so you can grow more cover crops), then consider succession plantings, intercropping, relay planting and follow-on crops (removing an old crop and flipping the space for another crop in the remainder of the growing season). If you have plenty of growing space, including for cover crops, then you might go for an EXtensive rather than INtensive garden, and use equipment to deal with weeds.

10. Tweak Your Plan: look at the overview of your planning so far and especially look for ways to improve. Do you want to extend your season in either direction? It’s easier to get extra harvests for a month or two in fall from mature plants you already have, than it is to get harvests a week earlier in the spring. Keep your highest priorities in mind: crops for your best markets, the signature crops you are famous for, and food for your household. Perhaps an old crop is not worth keeping, if pulling it helps you establish a new crop in a timely way. Use all available space for food crops or cover crops. Be sure to transfer any changes made in one spreadsheet to the related ones.

11. Plan B: Write some notes on what you might do if something goes wrong. Keep lists of fast-growing crops, phone numbers of neighbors, articles about dealing with floods, etc. If something does go wrong, write down what happened and why, what you did and whether it was successful, and any ideas that might have worked better, so you are better prepared next year.

12. Record-keeping: be sure to keep good records so that in a year you can tweak your plan to make it better for next year. Make recording easy to do. Minimize the paperwork. Record your planting dates and harvest start and finish dates right on your planting schedule. Have a daily practice of writing down what was done that day: Planting dates, harvest start and end dates for each planting of each crop; the amount of work done on each crop; the amount harvested. Allow time to do that, without losing your lunch break! At the beginning of the winter, have a Crop Review Meeting, discuss and write up what worked and what didn’t, to learn from the experience and do better next year. If your records suggest adjusting a date next year, adjust it to halfway between last year’s plan and what seems ideal – gradually zero in on the likely date without wild pendulum swings based on variable weather.

Garden planning manual

 

Preparing for spring, sowing seeds, planning

A flat of newly emerged lettuce seedlings Photo Kathryn Simmons
A flat of newly emerged lettuce seedlings
Photo Kathryn Simmons

Last Saturday, January 17, I made our first sowings in the greenhouse. I switched on the germinator cabinet made from a broken fridge, and the old incandescent light-bulb came back to life. Before I run out of incandescent light-bulbs, I’ll have to make a germination cabinet with a different form of heating. But I’m shelving that problem for now. On Saturday I sowed some early cabbage, the first lettuce, some scallions and some Red Marble mini-onions. I’ve been checking twice a day to make sure the light-bulb is still working and the temperature in the germination chamber is still OK. Nothing has needed watering. Today one of the cabbage varieties is emerging, so this afternoon I will clear some space for the flat in the greenhouse near the window. Ah! Signs of spring! Even if I did manufacture them, so to speak!

Our system is to screen compost in September, to fill the cinder-block beds in the greenhouse. Then we pop lettuce transplants at 10″ spacing into the beds. Those lettuces are big now, and we have started harvesting leaves from them for salad mixes. On Saturday, I pulled a few lettuces and scooped out some compost to fill the flats for my sowings.

As we need more space in the greenhouse, we’ll pull more of the lettuce. This system works well time-wise – lettuce is still only growing slowly, and we can benefit from this supply right now. It also works well in providing us with a large quantity of mellow screened compost for seed flats, that is indoors and not frozen. The tiny critters have had time to colonize the compost, so it is full of life. (Some of that life will be big white grubs, but I’ll kill those.)

Overwintered Vates kale. Photo credit Twin Oaks Community
Overwintered Vates kale.
Photo credit Twin Oaks Community

Meanwhile, we’re spending more time planning than doing production work. We are still harvesting from the hoophouse, making new sowings there (mostly spinach, some to plant in the hoophouse, some to plant outdoors), and harvesting the remaining outdoor crops. We had to rest the kale as we were in danger of over-harvesting it. We had some very cold weather, including one night at 3F.

The planning this week has included finishing up our Outdoor Planting Schedule (Field Planting Schedule) and doing the complex assigning of crops to our permanent raised beds. We managed to find a home for everything we want to grow, partly by employing some tricks. We will transplant our okra in the middle of beds of existing crops, one spinach and one kale. The okra starts will grow up tall and we’ll finish harvesting the kale and spinach, hoe off the debris, add some more compost and mulch around the okra plants. We’re going to have to finish off one bed of kale sooner than we might like to make way for the following crop, but by then we should have had plenty of kale (three spring beds added to 7 fall-planted beds).

Next week we’ll spread compost on the future spinach, turnips and the first couple of carrot beds. Then we’ll be ready to till those beds when the soil and weather suggest it’s time.

A bed of young transplanted lettuce. Credit Wren Vile
A bed of young transplanted lettuce.
Credit Wren Vile

While writing an article for Growing for Market magazine I came across the website on Vegetable Transplant Production from the University of Florida Vegetable horticulture Program. It has a collection of great articles developed by Charles Vavrina in the late nineties. Plants still grow the same way! Check out the site for lots of useful tips about growing and using transplants. This is a good time of year to make plans to do something in a different way, to avoid repeating last year’s less successful episodes!

My reading material has included the Jan/Feb issue of the Organic Broadcaster. This issue includes exciting news about a new open pollinated bi-color sweet corn variety Who Gets Kissed which has been developed for organic growing by co-operation between farmers, breeders and researchers. It is available from High Mowing Seeds. Next year Abundant Bloomsdale spinach, a variety bred with collaboration from eight organic farms, will be released by the Organic Seed Alliance. I’m looking forward to trying that.

The Organic Broadcaster includes an article about pesticide drift by Harriet Behar, arguing for compensation for organic farmers whose land is polluted by pesticides. This topic is a hot one for Joanna and Eric Reuter of Chert Hollow Farm. They are writing a three part blog post about experiencing pesticide drift. So far, the crop testing they had done has been paid by taxpayers, and the perpetrators seem to be getting off with just a reprimand. No fine to balance the costs of testing. The injustices stack up.

Other articles in the Broadcaster include one about John Jeavons’ GrowBiointensive method, another advising offering free-choice minerals to livestock, rather than a commercial mix, as this can cause animals to over-consume the mix to try to get the one mineral they are short of, and one on wholistic poultry welfare. There’s a book review of Farming with Native Beneficial Insects from the Xerces Society. I’m adding this to my wish list. There’s more we could be doing to encourage more beneficial insects in our garden. There’s an article recommending grain farmers add small grains to their crop rotations, and there’s information from a potato variety trial on Midwest organic farms. There’s another about “cottage food laws” which allow some home-made food products to be sold to the public, and more about value-added products of different types. And there’s advice from some “second career” farmers to others choosing farming after retiring from their other jobs. And one about how good record-keeping will pay fro itself when it’s time to prepare your taxes.

A honeybee on deadnettle weeds. Credit Kathryn Simmons
A honeybee on deadnettle weeds.
Credit Kathryn Simmons