Plan Your Garden With These 5 Questions
Some people think that having a successful garden requires knowing a lot about plants and doing things “correctly,” but I disagree. You may not win contests or get featured in magazines, but having a Good Enough Garden is about creating a space that meets your needs and takes into account your specific desires and current capacity, while factoring in tried and true plant wisdom.
A Good Enough Garden plan combines outside information with your own intention.
In order to create a plan for a garden like this, I’ve developed a process that I use for my own garden as well as with my clients. Answer the following 5 questions in order. Your response to #1 informs #2 and so on, and when you get to the end of the list, you’ll have created a diagram and a schedule for the coming garden season. This is your framework to build your garden on, knowing that mother nature never lets us execute the plan EXACTLY as we envisioned.
Here’s the overall step-by-step process. I go into more depth on each question in separate blogs.
WHY?
The first thing to get clear in your mind is why YOU want to garden. There are dozens, if not hundreds of good reasons to grow a garden, but which ones are most important to you? The person who wants to grow food for a large family is going to create a much different garden plan from the person who wants to experiment with growing unusual plants. They will choose different varieties, they will allocate space differently, and they will schedule out planting and harvesting at different times. It’s also important to keep your priorities and motivation in mind when you are reading gardening advice or shopping for supplies and plants. It can be tempting to follow every expert’s advice or to purchase all the cool new plants at the garden center, but taking a second to check in with yourself about whether this tip or seed packet will actually get you closer to your goals can save you some time and money.
2. WHAT?
Once you’re clear on why, it’s much easier to determine what to grow. Using the same example, the gardener who’s feeding a family might choose to grow just the foods that their kids enjoy, selecting varieties that are reliable producers and disease-resistant, or foods that provide significant calories like potatoes or carrots, or foods that are easy to store over winter or can be preserved. The experimental gardener might select 7 different varieties of tomatoes and enjoy comparing the taste of all of them, or mix in various companion flowers with their veggies to monitor the effect on insects.
While your intention is helpful in determining WHAT to grow, information starts to become a major asset in this step. What plants ARE disease resistant? Which plants DO store well? What companion plants HAVE been shown to draw beneficial insects?
Do some introspection along with some research to make your decisions.
3. HOW MUCH?
Just like the question of “what,” deciding how much to grow requires combining your intention with reliable information. Perhaps you want to grow enough tomatoes to make plenty of jars of salsa, but how many tomato plants will that take? Because of the unique conditions in your garden and the unpredictability of the weather, it’s not possible to say exactly, but click the link below to get a general idea of how much you can expect to harvest from each type of plant. Then determine how many plants you should grow to meet your needs.
Read more on how to determine WHAT and HOW MUCH to grow…
4. WHERE?
When determining where to grow a certain plant, you’ll want to lean a bit heavier on the information known about a plant than your intention for growing it. Factors like sun exposure, soil quality, moisture, and proximity to other plants and wildlife will definitely affect the health and beauty of your garden veggies and flowers. Tomatoes grow best in 8+ hours of sun, with their roots in nutrient-rich moist soil, and no matter if you are growing them for fun, or to feed a family, or to forego the corporate food distribution chain, the tomatoes plants still want to live in the same spot.
If you have multiple locations that provide the same or similar conditions, then you can also factor in your personal needs and desires. Maybe you think front yard vegetables are a cool statement. Or maybe you will decide to plant your child’s favorite foods near the border of a bed where they can easily tend and harvest for themselves.
4. WHEN?
Like the question of “where,” when to plant and harvest isn’t really an individual preference, it’s something you should plan with outside advice from regional-focused gardening books and local trusted resources like your university ag extension office or master gardeners’ group.
We divide plants into groups based on the season they grow best in. You can schedule out your planting according to when those seasons occur in your area. Adding all these dates to your calendar at the beginning of the year keeps you on track to provide the best environment to suit a plant’s needs. Keep in mind, these are only estimates. The weather is unpredictable and you may need to move planting dates up or back a week or two depending on the actual forecast for the day you planned to plant.
Your own intentions and goals do still have an effect here, though. Perhaps you want to add some covers to your garden to allow you to grow more food in colder weather. Perhaps you know you’ll be out of town or busy with other things during a certain point in the season, so you’ll need to adjust planting dates to accommodate. Knowing your goals can help you decide how closely you want to stick to your garden schedule, or how much risk you’re willing to take with weather: someone relying on the garden for food might not plant tomatoes if there is a chance of a late frost in the forecast, while another person might want to experiment with frost covers and has no problem replacing a plant if it dies.
Now that you’ve got your Good Enough Garden planned, it’s time to make sure your space is ready and in time for that first planting date on your calendar.
And if you’d like help through each step of this process, schedule a garden planning consultation. Now is always the perfect “when” for that.
