Planning out my garden - Year 1

Welcome, I'm just starting this blog, and starting my first "real" garden at my new house.  Up to now I have only been studying about gardens, but this year gets to be my first.  I've decided to go ahead and start a blog, as every one says that a journal should be kept, and I figured why not share my results with others.  Note to the reader, i'm a programmer, not a writer so please just forgive my ramblings :) and complete disregard for the proper use of the english language.

For this blog post i'm going to 1) go over the basics of my garden, and 2) go over the steps I used to plan out my garden for this year.  My next post I hope to go over what's being planted where and why.

Basics of My Garden

• Plot Size: 24' x 24'

I've decided to do raised beds, following my own version of the biointensive method (it's not overly close to the biointensive, but it is based off what i learned  from the book).  I have 4 raised beds (or have planned to, i'll go over digging in a blog post when I get to do it), 3 are 4ft wide, by 20 ft long, and one is 2ft wide, and wraps around the other 3, and is up against my fence (which is why it's only 2ft wide, so i can reach it).  The 2ft wide one is basically 68ft by 2ft.

• What to plant?

I'm interested in learning how to save seeds, so I'm going with mostly heirloom seeds.  I purchased one of those "end of the world" survival cans, which had like 35 varieties of heirloom seeds.  That is a great way to start, I just went on amazon and got the cheapest one for like $20.  It came with most everything that I want to plant.  Other than those seeds, I have currently purchased: white radishes, dwarf pok choy, kale, mint, and marigolds.


Planning out my Garden
As this is my first year, and it's winter time, I'm only able to research.  And research I have :).  I've learned several different techniques, including companion planting, double digging, intensive gardening, composting, etc.  All of which I hope to someday be able to implement.  This section however is the steps I've gone through to plan out my garden, and hopefully someone else will be helped by looking over the steps I've followed.  It should be noted, that I do enjoy complexity and spreadsheets :), and have used them extensively.

• Step 1:  Create a spreadsheet of all the seeds you have

My spreadsheet goes over the exact name, such as: Rutger Tomatos.  It goes over every piece of detail that is on the seed packet, days to germinate, days to harvest, etc.  I've added all my plants to it, and add more as I get them.  This phase lets me know what I have, so that I can do step 2, which is:

• Step 2: Decide which plants you'd like to have

I started another spreadsheet, of course, and rated each seed from 1 to 5, 1 meaning I have to have it in my garden, and 5 meaning not this year.  I went through the plants and thought about how many plants I'd need to get what I want.  For example tomatos, 4 or 5 plants will probably give me enough tomatos, where as carrots, I want as much as I have room for.

• Step 3: Figure out the Square Footage

This step I decided how much space i'd like to use for my garden.  I found that 24ft x 24ft gave enough room for my kids to still play outside, and left room for my fruit trees to mature.

• Step 4: Design out your raised beds

This is still just a plan, i'm not yet to building the raised beds.  But I took some graph paper and drew a 24 x 24 grid.  I then knew I wanted about 2ft of walking space between beds and beds that were at least 4ft wide.  So I started to draw out my beds.  I went through 2 or 3 plans before resting on my final plan.  I'll post up a design of what I came up with in a later post, but basically it looks like a big C with 3 lines inside it.  The C itself 2ft wide and goes around 3 sides of the perimeter of the garden, and the lines inside are 4ft wide by 20ft long.  With 2ft walk ways around each grow bed.

• Step 5: How much sqft per plant?

Now that I knew the square foot that I had available, I went through my plants to decide how much of each to plant.  This year I want to try as many varieties as I can to see what works, what we eat, what we don't, etc.  So I went through all the plants I gave a 1, and calculated how much sq footage i'd need based on their spacing (found on the seed packet or online if you have the exact seed type).  Example:  I want 4 tomato plants, and they need to be on the edge of the bed where i'm adding trellises, they have a 24inch spacing, so I needed 16sq ft for them.  Bed 1 and 2, on the north side, each have a 2ft x 4ft section for my tomatoes.  I went through all plants like this (though the tomatoes were the only ones that I decided where they'd go in the plan).  I did this until I used up all the sq footage I had available based on my plan.  I got somewhere to the mid 3's or 4's on my priority list before my space was all used up.

• Step 6: I learned about companion planting

I looked all over and decided to do some basic companion planting.  Using sites like gardenate.com (one of my favorites) I found which plants like which plants, etc.  Carrots for example love Tomatos (in fact, so much so that there's a booked named that).  I went through and on a piece of paper, wrote down each plant I wanted to plant, cut them out, and started rearranging plants to be close to the plants they like, and farther away from the plants they don't.  I kept shuffling around until everything looks decent (this can continue to be perfected i'm sure, but it's decent).

• Step 7: Using gardenate.com to setup a timeline

For those who haven't visited gardenate.com yet, you should :), it's excellent.  It may not per a perfect representation for every type of plant, but it really simplifies things.  It has divided up every month and what plants need work each month.  This allowed me to go through and copy the information for the plants that I need so that I had a plan tailored to me.  I haven't gone through my specific seed types to change harvest times or anything, but I'll worry about that next year :).  I simply have a list of what I do what months for the plants I'm planning on planting.  Very nice

Conclusion
At this point, I have the basic plan for what to plant, where in my garden it will be, and what I need to do each month to get started.  I still need to plan out my fall garden, which I'd like to do as much as possible before march gets here and the garden begins, but the plans won't be 100% until I find out what does and doesn't work as expected :).

I tried tons of different ways to plan out a garden, but when I finally followed these steps I was able to create a solid plan that feels planned out enough that I like it.  I'm probably more picky than most, but this part is part of the fun for me.  I'm sure it would have been easier if I'd have just settled with 2 or 3 plant types, but no, I'm going with more like 25 different plant types, everything from carrots, to corn, to bok choy.

Look for future blog posts going over:

• Soil Blocking - looks like a cool way to start all seeds
• Composting - Eventually I hope to start a compost pile
• Building Raised Beds - Pictures and everything for what it takes to actually build the raised beds, including trellises and deep digging
• Planting, tracking, and harvesting
• Saving Seeds - I hope to do as many plants as I can this year, and to record every part I can
• and more (over the next several years hopefully)