GROW YOUR OWN FOOD GUIDE - 14

Plann-ting Your Garden

Welcome Back

We’ve covered a lot of ground! Aren’t you amazed at how far we’ve come in such a short period of time? I’m glad we decided to plan ahead this year. It can be chaotic if you forget to start early trying to get a garden going from scratch in April.

Today I’ll cover plann-ting methods for both in-ground gardens and raised beds. After this post, some of you will be able to get seeds in the ground by the end of this month!

---

Farmer’s Store

Please check out my Farm Store if you haven’t already. Use discount code Honey at check out for 5% all honey sizes! Getchu Some!

High Mowing Organic Seeds Affiliate Link

Affiliate partner with a huge selection of organic seeds.

Nature Hills Affiliate Link

Check out this affiliate link for a wide selection of trees for your property. I will do a substack on Fruit Trees soon!

---

Planning Your Garden

How much produce do you need?

This is a great question!

Actually, we should have asked this question a couple of weeks ago when we were preparing our garden sites and beds because my answer is not that great.

How much space do you have?

How much you can produce is a matter of how much square footage of soil you have available. Therefore, the real question is how much food can you grow in the garden space you have available this season.

Garden Goals

Your garden plan depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with your garden. If this is your first attempt at growing a garden, then you should focus on learning the basics. I would advise you to keep it simple and plant a small variety of some of the high yield vegetables, I’ll cover this in depth later.

If your goal is to try to live completely off of your garden year round, then you will need lots of space obviously. No matter what your garden goal is, you should always try to plant as much as possible, the more plants you have growing, the more opportunity for success you have. Some plants are stronger growers than others for whatever reason. It’s smart to have 2 or more of each crop in case one of them rugs on you. You can always give away excess produce, or even sell it if you are confident in your product.

Here is a basic chart I found that shows you a guideline for how many plants it takes of each type of crop to feed your family. You may not have enough room (or spare time) to grow this much food, but if you wanted to cover yourself for a year, these are some general guidelines for the amount of plants you need for each type of crop. You can use this as a guideline to get an idea of how many crops you want to plant.

Succession Planting

Remember most plants do not produce the entire season, especially in hot climates. Crops begin to “peter out” after a few weeks of production. Planting in succession increases your crop yield and allows you to reach high production numbers. As an example: You would plant a set of crops and start another set of the same crops a week or two later. This way, when one set of plants slows down in about a month, you still have another set producing. When the first set starts to slow down, you pull them up and start a new set in the same spot, this give you maximum production over the growing season. This can be done in row style gardening as well. Plant one row of beans, and plant another one a week or two later, then you replant the first row when production slows down.

Raised Bed Planning

If you are planting raised beds, you are most likely limited on garden space. Therefore, we need to be smart and plant the most efficient plants that grow the most food with the smallest area. Certain plants require more space than others, so it’s important to make sure the garden is set up properly. In order to set up your garden properly, we need to decide what plants are the most efficient. I like to think of this as plant efficiency=crop yield/garden space required. With limited space, we are looking for crops that take up a small amount of garden area, and produce large amounts of food.

Cold weather plants like carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage typically grow one yield of produce per plant. Therefore, their yield per garden space ratio is small. In my opinion, these types of plants are not ideal for a small garden due to the fact that you will spend a month or more waiting on the plant to produce only to get one dinner’s worth of food. For these types of crops it only makes sense if you are able to grow at least 5-10 plants so you can get several meals from the fruits of your labor.

Carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, onions, and other root crops aren’t as bad because they take up very little space and can be planted close together. Using less space in your garden might allow you to grow enough to actually make it worth your while. However, in a small garden bed application, you still may not get more than a few meals out of these root style vegetables. If you really enjoy any of these vegetables, by all means, please don’t hesitate to plant whatever you like! It’s good to learn “the hard way” so don’t let me keep you from experimenting with different crops to figure out what works best for you.

Another type of vegetable species that you need to watch out for is called Cucurbits. These are typically vine style plants, like squash, cucumber, watermelon, cantaloupe, gourde, and pumpkin. They are also inefficient in a small garden setting, in my opinion, because of the amount of space they require. These types of plants will literally take over your whole garden if you let them. To be fair, there are some cucurbits that are more well behaved than others, Squash and Zucchini tend to be a little more self contained. Most of the others are vine style and will go wherever they want to go. They will use other plants to grow on and wrap their vines around all of their fellow neighbor plants. It turns into a mess after they grow wild for a few weeks and could hinder your neighboring crop yield. For this reason, you will want to keep them over in a spot by them selves or maybe even avoid these style plants all together.

In my humble opinion, (and in my neck of the woods), you get more bang for your buck with other more efficient plants in a small garden setting. You want to go for plants that take up a small area, and continue to provide lots of produce for several weeks or throughout the entire summer. For warm weather crops, these include, green beans, long beans, cherry tomatoes, summer spinach, okra, and peppers. For cool weather crops, these include certain types of lettuce, spinach, collard greens, and kale.

Moderately efficient crops include large slicing tomatoes, carrots, radishes, turnip, corn, and potato. I say moderately efficient because large tomato plants can be difficult to produce. They are a very needy plant in my opinion and is not always easy to get bright red tomatoes with out extra effort and proper care. (Cherry tomatoes are much easier to produce TONS of produce.) Corn is another crop that I haven’t had good luck with. And one corn crop only produces a few ears of corn so it doesn’t really make sense to plant corn in a small space garden.

Raised Bed Garden Planning Recap:

Depending on your location and skillset, this is a general list of how I view different crops in the garden (cool and warm weather type)

• Low Space Requirement/High Yield - Green Beans (Bush), Cowpeas (bush), Cherry Tomatoes, Okra, Peppers, Squash, New Zealand Spinach, Collards, Turnips, Radishes, Carrots, Lettuce, Kale

• Medium Space Requirements/Less Yield: Cucumbers, Large Tomatoes, Eggplant, Winter Peas, Sweet Potatoes, Beets, Swiss Chard, Rhubarb, Potato,

• High Space Requirement/Low Yield - Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Pumpkin, Gourd, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Corn

Trellis

There are certain types of crops that require or benefit from what is called a trellis. A trellis is a structure that plants use to grow on. They can be used in both raised beds and in-ground garden styles. They are beneficial in raised beds to increase growing space. Some types of crops like beans and peas require trellis. It will say on the seed packet or in the description wherever you buy your seeds.

Autist Note* - If you are a beginner, I highly recommend buying “bush style” beans, and staying away from peas and beans that require trellis. The beans will say “pole” if they require a trellis.

If you do cucumbers in your small garden, you will want to use a trellis to save space. For this reason, it’s a good idea to put the cucurbits near the edge of one end of your bed. If you have multiple beds you would definitely want to keep the cucurbits in a bed by themselves.

Plant them to the edge of the bed with the lattice close by so they can climb with ease. For lattice ideas I try to use material around my house, bamboo grows near my house so I’ll use it to make a frame and come back with some twine in between for the plants to grab onto. Here is an example of how to set your garden up with a trellis:

Tomatoes need some type of structure to help them stand up, so you need to give them extra space on all sides so that you can add a cage for them to lean on. Something like this is all they need, but they will out grow one of these cages in a hurry. We’ll go over how to care for your plants later in the season.

Depending on what you want to plant, you can simply use the guides on the seed packs for general seed planting information. It will tell you how much sunlight they need, how deep to plant the seeds, how far apart to space the seeds, and when to plant them. I recommend looking up the plants in your state’s agriculture school or university and see if you can find a growing guide for the specific plants you’re growing that is tailored for your location.

I found this website by googling “Michigan state agricultural college” and then clicking on the first college that popped up and then I typed in “gardening” in the search bar and this pulled up. You can see they have a TON of resources on this website from fruit to vegetables and more!👀

Even more resources are found in my old substack articles, I hate to sound like a broken record, but these two articles are jam packed with alpha on setting up your raised beds, including lattice, spacing, and more.

Here is a good article that explains the idea for lattice gardens by Bowtied ScapeGoat.

Here is a good article by Bowtied Garden that explains the layouts and planting method for raised beds.

Lastly, potatoes are a crop that is able to produce a ton of food in a very small area. The method you will want to use is called the potato box method. To keep this article somewhat short, I’m linking to a good explainer of the potato box method showing exactly how its done, HERE.

In-Ground Garden Planning

In-Ground Planning is much different. You usually have more room than raised beds. So you have more options. However, you still need to pick the most efficient plants to maximize your yields. Depending on how much garden space you have, the same rules still apply. For example you must give watermelons a TON of room and you might only get 3 or 4 watermelons on one plant. Therefore, I still recommend the same plants as I did in the raised bed garden section, and I still recommend staying away from trellis gardening unless you just really like doing extra work, and bringing extra heartache to your life. With trellis, it’s just another thing to get blown down by the wind, or knocked over by your two year old, I generally don’t do trellis in my garden.

Sunlight

With that out of the way, you now know what you want to plant in your garden. The last thing to keep in mind when planning your raised bed or in-ground garden is sunlight requirements. Some plants are taller than others. It’s important to make sure to plant taller plants to the north side of the garden so that they don’t block out sunlight to the shorter plants.

Tall plants include: corn, okra, tomatoes, and any type of plants you are growing on a trellis, so make sure these crops are on the far north side of your garden. Next would be your peppers, squash, eggplant, bush beans. Then everything else planted on the far south side.

Continue to follow your local planting guides or the instructions on your seed packets for spacing requirements and seed depths to make sure you have enough space in your garden. Here is a general guideline for planting requirements and crop yield for row style gardens:

Garden Journal

Journaling is a good practice in life, and it’s the same with gardening. Keeping detailed notes of your planting season is a good idea because it provides you with a wealth of first-hand knowledge that you can go back and reference easily. You will be surprised how quickly you forget where you planted your tomatoes last year, or how long it has been since you harvested your crops.

Now that we’ve covered everything you need to plan out your garden, it’s a good idea to sketch out your garden plans. Draw up your garden and label where each plant will go. You can even use graph paper and even draw it to scale, so you can be sure you have enough room. Keep these sketches in a notebook with your garden journal and add to it each year. This will be a valuable tool for you in the future I promise!

Now you have a general idea of how your garden will look and you should be well prepared for planting. See you next week!

WAGMI

Farmer