Learn how to plan a garden from start to getting vegetables and fruits in the ground. These simple steps will walk you through the process.
When it comes to planning a garden, you might not think there’s a lot to it. You might think that you just stick some plants in the ground and watch them grow. However, gardening is an art and a science. It requires some planning and some thought ahead of time to ensure that you get the maximum output from the space you’re growing in.
Today I’m sharing some tips that you should think about when deciding how to plan a garden. If you’re starting from scratch, this post is perfect for you. And if you’ve had a garden or two before, this post still might be able to help you grow as a planter to produce a more successful yield. Let’s get started!
Pick your place
When it comes to how to plan a garden, the first thing you need to do is pick your site. Ideally you want to pick a place that has lose, well-draining soil and gets anywhere from 6 to 8 hours of sunlight.
As far as the soil goes, I’ve learned over the years that you can really amend most soil to be compatible with the kind of vegetables or flowers you want to plant. As long as your soil isn’t straight clay, most soils will work for a garden space. Just make a plan to enrich the soil – no matter where you plant – with compost and other gardening soil to help build the nutrients.
However, there are some places you should stay away from when picking a place for the garden.
- Don’t plan a garden in spaces where the soil stays wet or is poorly draining.
- Don’t plant under trees and shrubs unless the plants are companion plants and can help one another thrive.
Determine the garden size
When developing a strategy for how to plan a garden, you need to figure out how big you can go. Then, don’t go that big. A mistake a lot of early gardeners make is that they become overly enthusiastic and plan a garden that needs a lot more work than they are capable of. I’m guilty of this so I don’t feel like the right person to be doling out this advice. 🙂 However, learn from my mistakes and make your first year garden smaller. Then let it grow as you grow.
Aside from not going too big, there’s a few other things to note.
How much space is available? If you live in an apartment with a balcony, you might be container gardening. And that’s fine. If you live in the suburbs of a city, you might only have one or two boxes to use. That’s fine too. Keep in mind you can still be a small space gardener.
How big is your family? When it comes to family activities, gardening is something you can do all together. If you just want to help feed your family of four then you can do that in a much smaller space than you can a family of eight or 10.
What will you garden in?
When deciding how to plan a garden, you will need to decide what kind of garden you want to plant – or can plant. A lot of people nowadays seem to plant in raised beds. However, you can also grow straight in the ground too if your soil is healthy. I’ve done both and they both have their benefits.
When growing straight in the ground, I use a cover that we burn holes into for the seeds. I usually plant my seeds straight in the ground then. That’s how I planted all my flowers last year and a pumpkin and sunflower patch.
In the flower space, I amended the soil by adding compost to it. Since it was just flowers – and not edible ones – I added compost in March and let it sit there until June. Then we covered it with the landscape fabric and created holes. In the back by the greenhouse we surrounded the area with railroad ties just to define it and make mowing easier.
In the pumpkin and sunflower space in the front, we tilled the ground and then covered it with landscape fabric for a month before burning in holes for seeds. No additional nutrients were provided to the soil there.
In our vegetable garden, I use raised garden beds. You can find our DIY raised beds {HERE}. I do this for a couple reasons.
- Almost all of our land is a little too wet in wet season and there’s not a space that truly drains well. I know I told you that well-draining soil was important when picking your space, but we don’t have that here. Or if we do, there’s a building on it. The beds help lift my veggies and give the water somewhere else to go so they don’t bog down the roots.
- I wanted to create the soil composition for planting my vegetables the first year. Since I wasn’t sure how things were going to go (And I was too lazy to send out and pay for a soil test), I planned on amending my soil straight from the start. I wanted to make sure the nutrients I put into it would give me the best yield.
- Reason 3? My taller boxes are easier on my back and my knees. 🙂
Decide what to grow
Deciding what to grow when you develop a strategy for how to plan a garden is probably the most fun part. I know that it’s appealing to try to grow everything you can the first time, but based on the space you have, that’s not always a possibility. Here’s how you can decide:
Grow the things you will eat
If you’re not going to eat spaghetti squash, don’t grow it. One year I grew crooked yellow squash and because I had a space to fill. It grew like wildfire, and we ate two of them because we didn’t like the outer texture. It would have been more beneficial to us to add another tomato variety to that space instead.
Crop output
If you want plants that put out a lot to harvest, then there are certain plants that are more fruitful. Tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and beans will give you more bang for your buck when it comes to output. Crops like melons, broccoli, cauliflower, radishes, beets and carrots will produce less per seed. And to get a lot of them, you need a lot of space.
Grow something that excites you
Each year, I like to plant one crop that just makes me happy. In 2020, it was my pumpkins that excited me. We made a pumpkin trellis {HERE} and it was the first year I had grown them. Last year, it was loofahs and tiger melons. Sadly, my tiger melons didn’t do so well. However, my loofah did AMAZING! And seeing them every day was just the lift I needed each morning.
Individual vegetable location
When deciding how to plan a garden – especially a vegetable garden – it’s important to know that placing companion plants together has its benefits.
Companion plants are plants that help each other thrive whether through benefits from soil nutrients, insect protection & benefits, pollination, crop productivity and maximizing space
For example, tomatoes are good companion plants for carrots, peppers, squash and cucumbers. But they make bad companions for potatoes, corn, broccoli and cabbage. Click {HERE} to see all my tips for growing tomatoes!
Here’s a quick chart I created on some of the most popular vegetables that you can use when figuring out how to plan a garden.
How to plan a garden
When you are planning a garden, it’s best to plot it so you can see how everything will go together visually. I’ve done this in two ways.
I’ve used graph paper to block out the design of the garden. You can find that {HERE}.
I’ve also done this in PowerPoint on the computer.
The graph paper is more charming. But the computer allows me to adjust things faster if I need to make a change. You can see my 2020 planning I made on graph paper {HERE}.
However, plotting everything out – whether on graph paper or on the computer – will show you how everything fits together and give you a good idea of how things will look. I recommend sitting down and thinking through this so that you can better plan for all the seeds you have AND to get a nice, visual plan for your garden.
Come time to plant, I always appreciate being able to refer back to this while I’m sitting in the garden with a tray of seedlings. I will carry it around on my phone so I can refer back to it during that time.
When to plant a garden
Determining the best time to plant your garden will depend on your garden zone. Garden Zones are technically referred to as Hardiness Zones. These zones are the standard and geographic areas in which plants are most likely to thrive. The map of zones is based on the average annual winter temperature.
My zone is 5b/6a. I live on the cusp of both zones just to the East of Lake Michigan, which tends to create its own little weather systems. Due to this, I should not plant seedlings or seeds outdoors before the middle of May. I also generally can’t plant over the winter like people in the southern half of the United States can or more tropical locations like Southern California and south Florida.
Cool whether plants versus warm weather
Once you know your zone, separate the vegetable seeds into cool weather seeds or warm weather seeds. Cool weather seeds can be planted earlier and thrive in cooler weather. For instance, peas, cauliflower, broccoli and lettuce can handle a little frost. They are cold weather crops. They don’t do well in the heat of the summer but thrive around 50-60 degrees.
Vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and zucchini are warm weather vegetables. They need temperatures around 70 or so to blossom and produce fruit.
The general advice is, you will want to start warm weather seeds indoors about 4-6 weeks prior to being able to plant outdoors. I will tell you though, I personally think 6 weeks is too soon and my plants are often busting at the seams by that point. I will also tell you that sometimes I’ve planted some plant – like pumpkins and loofah straight in the ground and they seem to catch up.
Thank you so much for visiting today, friends! I hope you enjoyed this post on how to plan a garden. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below. For more garden posts, click {HERE}.
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