Garden Planning

I blocked off President's Day to plan my garden for the year and I'm glad I set aside a big block of time to do so as the plan below took seven hours to make. Last year, I knew what I wanted to plant and I had a plan, sort of, on paper, but I wasn't sure when to plant or how many to plant or when I would find time to plant and a lot of things didn't get planted. The thought came to me that the seed packets say how long until things mature and that I could use Excel to help me plan. You can follow along by clicking on the link below. It might be worth it to open the link in another page in case you want to click back and forth between it.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxUxaRWOUbLW_9pUzuqJ9Yw

First, I went through the seed catalogs and made a list of everything I wanted to grow this year. Even though I received many catalogs, I decided to only order from two of them. My catalogs of choice were Bountiful Gardens and Territorial Seed. I chose Bountiful Gardens because they have non-hybrid varieties and I eventually would like to start saving seeds. I ordered the majority of my seeds from them. The things I needed that Bountiful Gardens didn't have, I got from Territorial Seed. I chose them because they are an Oregon company and their catalog is chock full of information. After completing my list, which you can see in the "To Plant" tab of the spreadsheet, I moved some things to the "maybe" list at the bottom. I then sorted so the things I wanted to grow were alphabetically on top of the list and I looked in one of my books to see ideally when the things would grow, either spring, summer, fall or some combination of those three seasons. Then I created three columns, one each for spring, summer and fall. "X"s were placed in the correct column.

I could then sort and see all the things that needed to be planted in the spring. Right now the sheet is sorted so all the fall items come first because I ran out of time and haven't yet planned for fall. But you can look down the list and see the spring varieties too. After sorting and seeing what could be planted in the spring, I began plotting each item. I checked to see what the spacing between plants was, using the book "How to grow more vegetables" by John Jevons. Then I went over to my sheet "Spring," where I had created a schematic of all the garden spaces I have available, and plotted the item into a spot. Then, back on the "To Plant" sheet I marked a "y" under the column "plotted spring". This way I knew each crop was on the map.

After plotting, I decided when to plant things. This is where the "Dates" chart came in handy. I'm pretty excited about the "Dates" chart. I started with 1/1/08 and created a line for each day in the year. Then, I added in the day of the week and highlighted Saturday and Sunday when I do the majority of my gardening. After that, I put in the day of the year for each date. For instance, it's easy to know that January 30th is the 30th day of the year, but more difficult to figure out which day February 18 is. (It's the 49th day of the year.) If you haven't guessed, you'll see why this is important in a second.

Next I added four columns, "Seedlings," "Plant," "Harvest" and "To Do." I also shaded in the average last frost date and the average first frost date. All that being done, I was ready to add in my planting dates.

Let's take Lettuce as an example. According to my books* it said that lettuce could be started eight weeks before the last frost. I also knew that lettuce takes around 45-51 days to mature. Before the first frost, I was supposed to start the lettuce in flats for 4 weeks, then transfer them to outside. I also knew that a packet of lettuce seeds has a 80% rate of germination, by law. So, I counted back eight weeks from the last frost date to 3/1/8 and wrote in "6 lettuce" under "Seedlings" That meant to plant 6 lettuce seedlings indoors under my grow light on that date. I figured two weeks for germination, so I navigated to 3/15 and wrote "3 lettuce" under the "plant" heading. This accounts for some failure to germinate which I estimated at 50%, rather than the 80% required by law because my seeds are from previous years. So I would know when to harvest, I counted down 3 weeks and wrote in "lettuce" under harvest. By explaining this I notice that I'm a bit off on my fully mature lettuce estimate, especially considering that lettuce takes 45-51 days to mature and I just allotted 21. And 21 pre-last frost cold spring days, at that. But the point is that I did this so I could make successive plantings of items and only have to do a small bit of planting work every week. Which is the idea. That way I don't plant 64 lettuce plants and have all 64 come to maturity in 4 weeks and then have nothing afterwards. It also alleviated the problem I had last year which was knowing I had to plant something, but not what, or where the heck it was supposed to go.

Once I had plotted spring on the calendar, I re-sorted the spreadsheet to see what were summer varieties. I checked to see which spring crops would be finished, making their space available for a summer crop. If you look at the plot on the right under the "spring tab", you can see that the peas, radishes, scallions and spinach will finish up and make way for watermelon which is on the "summer" tab. If you look on the "dates" sheet, you can see that on 5/17 I will start 6 watermelon seeds and on 6/14 I will plant 4 watermelon seeds after weeks of harvesting lettuce, radish, spinach and peas. By scrolling down 77 days, which is about the time it takes watermelon to reach maturity, you can see that if all goes well I will harvest watermelon on 8/30. It's a little late, but I have the benefit of growing other crops in that patch too.

After I finished plotting everything, I made a list of what I already had. This was imperative as I usually want to order 90% of things in the seed catalogs, but at $2.00 per packet, I need to show restraint. Because I have a small place for gardening I also don't use a full packet every year and can use seeds from previous years. The older the seeds get, the less they germinate, but I built that into my plans when starting seeds.

On the "Already Have" tab you can see what I have, it's name, how full the packet is, how many days the seed takes to mature, as reported on the packet (nm means "no mention"), the spacing (if using the biointensive method) and the row spacing (if using the row method.) While making that list it became apparent what I needed to order which became the "ordering" tab. I will continue to add to this sheet as I purchase things for the garden. As I begin to harvest, I will begin another tab that keeps track of what I harvested, when it was harvested and also the price of the item if had bought it at our local New Seasons market. I am choosing New Seasons as a price point because they have local, organic ingredients and you can shop online, making it easy for me to research prices from my computer. I hope to come out even or a bit ahead this year.

That's the plan. Check back here for updates.

I was working out of three books: How to grow more vegetables, as referenced above, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith and Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.