Screen shot of one section of my garden plan as it stands now. I'm sure I'll make more changes in the days and weeks to come!
The weatherman is predicting snow, sleet and freezing rain today, but no matter…I’m hard at work planning my garden. For me, this is a fairly involved and ongoing process because I enjoy it and in reality I’m actually looking at the long term – I want fruit trees and shrubs, nuts, wildlife plantings, annual veggies, herbs…the whole nine yards. So I do a lot of fiddling and tweaking and rearranging.
But if you’re a rank beginner, a complete newbie, a garden greenhorn…then don’t do as I do, do as I say. And I say, Keep It Simple Sweetie! Do not get in over your head!
Planning a vegetable garden
If it’s cold and snowy and nowhere near planting time where you are, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do until spring. It means you need to be getting ready now. In fact, if you ultimately end up joining the ranks of the gardening addicted, you’ll find that the time to begin next year’s garden is actually the previous fall! But that’s for the future. Right now, you have a few things to consider.
Where will you put the garden?
This is critical. Get this one wrong and your garden will be a complete and utter flop. A successful vegetable garden needs the following:
- At least 6, and preferably 8 hours of sun a day. As you consider your property and available spaces, think about the amount of sun that’s available in the summer – say, late May through September. Right now (at least in the northern hemisphere), the sun is low in the sky. Objects cast longer shadows and at different angles than you will get in the same space in June or July. Try to visualize what the area will look like six months from now. This is one reason gardening puts you in touch with nature; an absolutely fundamental aspect of gardening is knowing the path of the sun as it moves through the sky at different times of the year.
- Water. Make sure you have easy access to a garden hose for watering. If you have to haul water a long distance to the garden, you’ll soon throw in the towel – especially as the weather gets hotter – and your garden will wither and die.
- Easy access for you. Put the garden near the house; in the front yard if you have to! If you have to walk right by it several times a day, it’s much easier to pick out a stray weed, see that wilted plant or just pick a tomato on your way into the house. Gardens that are hidden away in the back of the yard soon become neglected and overgrown with weeds. Out of sight, out of mind is not where a garden should be.You also want the garden to be easily accessible from the driveway. If you bring home lumber to build a raised bed, or you have a load of topsoil or mulch delivered, make sure the garden is near your likely drop-off point. It’s also great if the garden can be located on the level or better yet, slightly below the drop-off point – so you’ll be pushing your loaded wheelbarrow downhill instead of up.
How big will it be?
Careful here…don’t get in over your head. Start small and consider enlarging your garden only after a couple of successful seasons. I would say that 100 square feet of growing space would be plenty if it’s your first season. (By the way, it’s possible to grow $700 worth of food in that much space!)
What form will it take?
I am a huge advocate of raised bed gardening. Years ago, gardens consisted of rows of plants, each separated by a path. Not only did this system waste a lot of space, the constant tromping on the paths meant that soil was being compressed right near the plant roots, hindering their growth. The compaction in the paths also guaranteed that digging or spading the soil was necessary every spring, a practice that we now know is harmful to the soil and the millions of microbes and creatures that live in it.
So, consider a couple of raised beds. My beds are 4′ wide by 12′ long and I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s too wide. If I stretch, I can reach the middle of the bed from each side, but I find I tend to cram too much in them and then late in the season I have problems finding things. Last year, for example, the tomatoes on one side of the bed flopped over on the broccoli on the other side because I couldn’t easily reach over the broccoli to tie the tomatoes. It was a mess.
Therefore, I’m planning on changing my beds to 32″ wide. You can get three 32″ pieces out of an 8′ length of lumber, so it’s an efficient use of wood, too. If you’re planning to use lumber, stick to a bed length that’s consistent with standard lumber sizes: 8′, 10′, 12′ or 16′. So, if you built four beds, each 32″ wide by 10′ long, you’d end up with just over 100 square feet of gardening area. Of course, the configuration of your beds can take any form that will allow you to make the best use of your space; just make sure they’re easy for you to work without having to step in the nice fluffy bed soil itself.
On the other hand, fertilizer (organic of course!) recommendations are commonly stated in terms of dosage per 100 square feet. If you make your beds 30″ wide (2 1/2 feet) and ten feet long, you will have a growing area of 25 square feet. In that case you’ll only have to divide the fertilizer recommendation by 4 to know how much to use. It saves a little math, if that’s important to you.
Whatever your bed size, make sure s sure you plan the spaces around them to accommodate the width of a wheelbarrow.
No digging! No kidding!
The best part of raised bed gardening though, is that you don’t have to dig. In fact, you want to avoid digging as much as possible. I’ll be going over the whys and wherefores of this in a future post or two, but if the prospect of all that back-breaking work as been holding you back from starting a garden, don’t let it. There’s little, if any, digging involved.
What to grow?
Only grow things you know you and the kids will eat! If you hate cauliflower, don’t try and grow it. Pick the easy veggies this first year: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, potatoes, zucchini. Get some good gardening books that are appropriate to your area and go through the veggie listings to get an idea of space requirements. You only need to know the “in row” spacing, not the “between row” spacing. You’re not doing rows, remember? Why should a plant need more spacing north to south than it needs east to west?
Okay, get planning!
Armed with a pencil, ruler, some graph paper and a couple of basic gardening books, it’s time to plan the garden that fits your space. If you can, do some measuring and include the edge of the house, sidewalks, driveway, etc. in order to orient yourself. It’s important to be fairly accurate in this because you don’t want to guess that you have room for six tomato plants when in fact you only have space for two. (Tomato plants can grow 5 or 6 feet high and a good 2 feet in diameter!) So do this with some degree of accuracy.
You don’t have to work on paper if you don’t want to. My plan (image above) is done in Adobe InDesign. And here’s an interesting plan I ran across. The whole thing was done in Excel, with the cells used to create the graph squares. Click on the image to enlarge it.
Daniel Halsey, at Southwoods Forest Gardens does some cool planning too, but I’m not sure what he uses – maybe Illustrator?
For more great garden inspiration, do a Google image search on “vegetable garden plans”. You’ll see dozens and dozens of plans and photographs, all a sight for sore eyes on a cold January day!
Have fun!
