Spring is quickly approaching which means it is time to plan our garden. Just thinking of the garden makes me feel the warmth of the summer. We are thinking we are going to have an unusually busy summer. With that being said we want to keep our garden simple, just the staples. Here is what we are thinking.
This is how we plan for our garden every year. Our brains work this type of way, especially Nick’s engineer brain. We look at what our most used staples are in the pantry from the past year. What didn’t we use? What can we turn into many different meals? We found that those items are our most used and our favorites. Next, we started looking at how much per person is needed to make it through a year and how many people in our household eat them. As the table goes on, you can see we give a range of the plants that are needed for our family. We set an idea of how many we were going to plant.
We then dive into the spacing. How far the plants need to be apart from one another in a row and how far the rows need to be spaced. These spacings are for optimal yield. Will they always be followed? No. Is that ok? Absolutely! Make do with what you have. Understand that if plants are crowded, they may yield less. Being close to other plants can help with pest control or can steal nutrients. But that will be in our blog about plants and their friends/enemies.
Lastly, for the table, we put our checklist. Did we order the seeds? This is here purely for my sanity. Without kids, I still lose track of things I have and haven’t done. If you look in our home we have to-do lists on the fridge, computer, and other places so I don’t forget! If you can relate to this, add a column to make sure you purchased the seeds. It can’t hurt, right?
Now we need to plan the layout.
First, we went out and measured our garden space from last year. This was a rectangle in our yard that was already tilled. When we, and by we I mean Nicholas, measured the garden, it was around 30ft x 40ft. Into Excel we went and started mapping. We wanted to make sure we had enough room for tilling and weeding around all of our plants. A 3-foot border was the minimum we wanted. Next, we looked at our list of plants and identified which ones worked best together. That set our order. Each box represents one plant. We do know that planning in Excel isn’t an easy way to show the spacing of the plants. But we aren’t professionals. We do this to help sustain our lives. We did plan enough space to ensure that when our plants are spaced out, we have enough room. All of that said, here is our plan!
Soon we will be talking about starting our seeds. What equipment we need, where we bought our seeds, etc. For now, we will keep dreaming of warmer weather and sunshine filled days.
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