The best way to learn plant spacing is just to observe your plants over a few years. (Personally, I find How To Grow More Vegetables to be quite tedious, and I am inclined to love garden geekery, so that’s saying something, but many people absolutely swear by this book.) If Square Foot Gardening is a bit too simplistic for your style, and you think I don’t put out nearly enough charts and gardening spreadsheets on this blog, then you might adore the plant spacing methods in John Jeavons’ How To Grow More Vegetables, possibly the most chart-heavy gardening book sold to the layperson. But despite some limitations it’s probably the simplest place to start for spacing info. It is my experience that the Square Foot Gardening spacing is 50-25% too small if you are interested in growing full sized vegetables, particularly the fall and winter crops I get so excited about (If your mature January King cabbage takes up one square foot of space, you did something wrong. SFG is an excellent starting point just to wrap your head around efficient grid spacing while planting. In terms of plant spacing, if you aren’t sure how much room a plant is going to take up, I recommend reading up on the Square Foot Gardening method’s plant spacing guidelines. Most of us urban gardeners want to maximize our yield in minimum spacing. I use pencil for a reason – this is an iterative process as you add a cabbage here and subtract a tomato there. Then I made notes for what Spring and Late crops would coordinate with the main plantings. Summer crops went into summer beds and Fall crops went into fall beds. Once the bed/zone drawings are in place, I just start penciling in my crops. Something that occurred to me that I didn’t mention in that post is that, by simply alternating back and forth between Summer/Late Crop and Spring/Fall beds, a pretty decent level of year-over-year crop rotation will naturally happen. I designated beds as either Summer or Fall beds, just like I talked about in my recent Succession Planning post. It seems to maximize space and variety and it looks good. I repeated that pattern a lot in my garden planning this year as you can see. For this reason, I often mix up plantings in my beds or plant in patterns. A typical pattern I like to use in my beds is a row or two of climbing thing to the North, grown up a trellis, with some large framed stuff like tomatoes or cabbage in the middle of the bed, and a border of little, ideally colorful things, like beets or onions. Or else, you know, just have a yard and be done with it. If you’re gonna have a garden, I say you might as well make it pretty. This level of precision is not necessary – a simple sketch will do just fine – but it does help if you are trying to cram as many plants as possible in your space. The garden planner I use (and sell… ahem.) has 1/4″ grid paper which I print out, then make 1/4-inch to 1-foot scale drawings of my beds. Actually, because of the way my garden has grown into multiple sections, I made three drawings – one for the front beds, one for the back beds and one for the hugelkultur area. I started, as I do every year, by making a drawing of my garden. If you have some seed that’s probably still good but might be losing viability, you can opt to give it one last big planting to finish the pack, or just use it for sprouting or “mixed greens blend” or something where perfect germination isn’t as critical. It’s a good idea to have a list of your seeds in front of you when you decide what you’ll be growing this year. (I was stuck on summer squash this year and, predictably, just over ordered.) Maybe your seed order is already in your hot little hands, maybe you are still trying to decide between different kinds of beets. It’s been months of seed catalogs by now. You’ve already got this figured out, no doubt. So, how did I make this garden plan, and how can you make one too? Well, don’t let the massive blocks of text put you off, its really pretty simple, actually. You can download a PDF of the whole thing here, or by clicking on the image below. The garden is 100% perfect right now, because it’s 100% imaginary, but I think I’ve got a fair shot at pulling most of this off out in the big, bad, slug-infested real world too. If you want to really know something, teach someone else, right? You what I found tremendously rewarding? Since I codified my year-round planning method into something that I can actually explain to people as a step-by-step process, I’ve found my own planning is made even easier. So, what does this have to do with gardening? Everything! Two sick kids was just the enforced down-time I needed to finalize my 2013 gardening plan. First the girl spent a week coughing her lungs out, then just when she had recovered enough to return to school, the boy spent a night puking all over me. So the past week my kids have taken turns with the sickies.
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