Planning your garden is a crucial step for any homestead. You can’t just blindly rush in and expect perfect results, but with a good plan you can accomplish great things even with a small space. Let’s break the steps of how to plan a garden and examine everything from site selection to what to grow.
The First Step in garden planning: Knowing What You’re Working With
Even before you pick where you’re going to place your garden you’re going to want to understand a few things about the land you have available. You don’t want to plant over your septic field or well for example. You’ll need to know the type and amount of sunlight an area gets, if water pools in your yard or not, where runoff goes, if there are buried cables, and even if you have certain yard pests like ground squirrels. Additionally, you’ll also want to know if your ground soil is good for planting and think about a ground plot vs raised beds for your garden.
Gathering all this information is your very first step. If you’ve just moved into a house or or planning to, you can get some of this information from the real estate agent and sometimes even the previous owners. If you move in to a new homestead during winter and haven’t send what spring and summer will look like, it can be hard to understand how water moves across your yard, what type of soil you have, and what the spring and summer sun will look like. You can make some educated guesses, but often you’ll just have to wait and see.
If you’ve lived in your house for a long time you probably know what the yard is going to be like and can make some good notes about things like runoff and sunlight, but might have trouble with other items. If you don’t know where you well and septic field are located (if you even have them) you’ll want to probe for them or pull up your any house documents or surveys that will contain this information. You can have septic professionals help you locate these when they do routine maintenance, but you mainly just want to avoid building any structures on top of them. Similarly for any buried cables you can often have
Site Selection: Planning Where Your Garden Goes
Site selection starts with availability. The notes you’ve acquired from the step before will help you map out all of your possible locations. Once you understand which locations are available and not on top of any buried cables or structures important for your home, you can start to looks at which sites will be best.
You should first portion out which spaces you will want to use for gardens at all. Some homesteaders like to convert as mush property as possible into gardens to offset food costs and live more sustainably. Others will only want to plan out a small garden for vegetables. If you’re not maximizing the space used you’re going to want to consider the following things when narrowing down your choices:
- For ground plots, is the soil good quality? If it is too sandy or too dense it can be hard to condition for new garden space.
- Will weeds grow there? This tip is a bit misleading because if weeds won’t grow in ground soil, neither will your vegetables.
- Does the are get enough sunlight? If the area is partially shaded you will want to figure out how many hours of direct sunlight it will get a day, this can limit your planting options if you still want to plant in that space.
- Is the area near a water source? While you can run hose to just about anywhere, sometimes water is just too far away to keep a garden properly hydrated without too much effort.
- Is the area a low spot? While you don’t often get to pick which space you have available, planting in a low spot can cause your garden to flood when it rains. If you must use a low spot, consider using raised beds and mulching over drainage medium between the planters to keep water moving through the area when it does rain.
- Is the area too near trees? Sometimes trees can block both sun and rain from reaching your plants, but even if they are smaller, their roots can become a problem for the garden over time. Certain trees even act as natural plant killers, such as walnut, and should avoid being planted directly next to if it can be avoided.
Once you’ve considered these factors you should be able to start crossing off the possible areas that won’t work. Remember, few gardens are ever in the perfect spot, so you’re really attempting to choose the best spot you have available rather than just a spot that works.
Once you’ve got your spot figured out you need to decide on the size of your garden. This comes down to a few major factors, but you should consider the space you have, the time you have to tend the garden, how much food you want to produce, and what types of plant you want to grow.
The space consideration is the easiest because you can’t use more suitable space than you have, but you don’t have to use all of it. If you don’t have much free time to garden and you don’t need as much extra food, limit your garden space to a more manageable size. Conversely, if you are committing to the homesteading lifestyle you will likely want to maximize the space and plan around your gardening time.
The last big consideration in choosing your plot size will be what you want to grow. You’re likely going to get very clear space requirements for each plant you want in your garden. Knowing if your plants will need a lot of space compared to what you want o get out of the space you have it a good way to estimate the size you need. Growing cabbages is a lot different than growing leaf lettuce, so keep in mind your actual utilization and ideas about yields.
Planning Your Garden
Now that you know where you are going to plant your garden you need to make a lot of decisions before you do anything else. The very first decision you need to make is if you want to do a ground plot or raised beds. The decision sounds simple, but it’s a big one to make, so think carefully before moving on.
Ground Plot vs. Raised Beds: Which is better?
Like most decisions in gardening choosing between ground plots and raised beds all depends on what you want to do with the land and the land you have to work with. If you are planning on growing a wide variety of things packed closely together, raised beds will offer you more freedom to do so and will be slightly easier to work with. If you’re planning on planting a lot of the same crop and have good ground soil a ground plot might be easier for you to manage.
Ground beds can be managed more simply utilizing a rototiller to prepare your soil, but they are susceptible to burrowing pests, natural soil issues, and flooding. Raised beds will provide you an easier space to weed and work with less burrowing pests and less chance of flooding, but your overall space is often a bit smaller and setup more costly.
Our recommendation for a small to modest sized homestead would be to use raised beds if you can. They simply provide more control over the garden soil, are easier to work with daily, and allow more flexibility in planting, especially for deep rooted crops. They’re not the simplest solution, but more often than not you will be able to get more consistent yields and better crops.
Planning your soil
Not matter what type of garden plot you end up choosing you are going to need to think about your soil. If you’re planting in ground for the first time in the area you’ll want to enrich it by tilling in compost or using a good organic fertilizer. You’re also going to need to test your soil pH and ensure that it is a hospitable place for your new garden to grow
If you are using raised beds you’re going to need to fill them up with fresh soil. Here is where some flexibility comes in as each raised bed can get a different type of soil depending on what you want to plant in there. This type of planning is completely optional as you can certainly get by with a good all purpose garden soil, but the more time you take choosing the right soil and ensuring it is fit to the plants that you intend to grow, the better your results will be. This can be a bit of a daunting task, so get ready to do a lot of reading after you choose the vegetables you want to grow so you can get the perfect soil for your garden.
Choosing What to Grow In Your Garden
Choosing what to grow in your garden can be a big decision and take a lot of mental energy because there are so many options available. The nice thing about this is that instead of planning around everything you could possibly plant you can work back to what you can even grow, then cut that list further down based on personal preference and utilization.
Plant Heartiness or Grow Zones
Your very first step here for figuring out what you can grow will be to look at the USDA’s plant heartiness zone map (typically refereed to as grow zones). Once you know what grow zone you are in it quickly eliminates whole collections of plants you’re not going to be able to grow and puts a lot of other plants into the hard to grow category for you to avoid.
Armed with your new information you can look up growable plants by grow zone using sites like Gardenia. Gardenia is just one place to look, but they list out nearly every type of plant you can grow by zone and even allow you to filter down by other criteria. The downside is they do not simply have an “edible plants” tag so you’ll spend a lot of time clicking past flowers and trees.
Personal Preference and Plant Selection
So now that you know what you could plant, it’s time to start picking what you want to plant. If this is your first vegetable garden you’re going to want to select some easy to grow crops for beginners. This isn’t because you can’t grow more difficult crops right away, it’s more because it’s a lot better to work out the kinks of your garden with crops that will produce no matter the adversity they face.
Realistically the easiest thing to do is to cross off any plant that you don’t like to eat first and foremost. Don’t grow food you won’t use. Then you want to choose your favorite crops that you would eat most often as early.
Crop utilization, health, and preference
Next choose based on utilization, health vs your personal preferences. For example, a high calorie garden will include more root vegetables that can keep longer like potatoes and carrots. A healthier garden will have lots of leafy greens like spinach and lettuce. For full utilization of a garden space combination of plants that can be used widely make the most sense. For example, we always grow potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, and at least one variety of bean.
That sample garden works in a lot of spaces in the US as each of those plants come in a wide number of varieties that are adapted for different zones. That being said, your perfect garden will have many different plants than anyone else’s. Honestly, gardens change from season to season and year to year as well, so it’s more about trying things out and seeing what works for you. We often change our garden plants for the next year based on what we used most and liked best.
Choosing Good Companion Plants
Companion planting is the idea that planting certain crops together will maximize their yield, prevent pests, and better utilize the space. When planning your garden we like to recommend that you choose at least a few types of companion plants to fill out your garden. Basil is a great plant to stick with tomates as it drives off pests and tomato and basil go perfect together in the kitchen. If you’re growing corn you may want to also plant beans and squash which can all grow in the same plot and each help the others grow better. Companion planting is tricky, so once you pick your major favorite crops look up which plants can be paired will with them rather than trying to solve a really complicated matching puzzle before you even pick your first plants.
Space Requirements and garden planning
As you start to pick your plants that you know you want to grow you’ll want to take note of their spare requirements. Realistically once you have an idea of what you might like in your garden you should list everything out in a spreadsheet. Here you’ll list at least the name of the plant, the water requirements, the soil requirements (including pH, drainage, and nutrients), how long they take to grow, how far apart they need to be planted, and finally their expected yield.
With all the information on that spreadsheet you’ll know which plants need to be planted closer together or in the same conditions. Knowing your expected yield (erring on the low side for caution) and the space required for each plant can help you map out which plants will go where and how much of any given plant you’ll want to grow. If you plant on getting multiple crops out of a single plot over the seasons, the time to maturity from this sheet will help you figure out if you can squeeze in some extra plant.
Committing to the Garden Plan
The next step is important. Take all your choices and write them down. It can be a sketch of the ground with a map of where you’re planting or something more sophisticated like a spreadsheet or garden planning software layout. However you do it, commit your plan to paper and lock it in. You’ll follow this closely to ensure that you are building your garden as necessary to succeed.
So many early gardeners botch their first gardens because they don’t stick to their plans. Even if you plan needs some adjustments, making sure you are noting that down and accounting for change in the plant first makes a huge difference. Going off script when setting up your garden can feel easier and more relaxed for sure, but it can also ignore some obvious problems that you can identify just by sitting down and considering the implications of the changes you want to make.
Perfect is the Enemy of Good
Our final piece of advice for you is don’t get too caught up on your plan. Perfect is an unattainable goal. You will have to make all sorts of compromises when you garden and you should expect that. If you spend too much time fretting over the perfect garden plan and not enough time actually preparing you’re going to end up with a less than ideal garden anyway.
Get a plan in place, even if it’s not exactly what you were thinking when you set out, and follow it. Being able to put a plan in place and follow it is a big key to success in the garden and we hope you’ll set your sights on attainable goals early on.
Get to Planning Your Garden
Planning your home vegetable garden doesn’t have to huge hassle. By thinking about things logically and doing the basic research required to get everything setup properly, you’re going to be able to create a stellar garden plan in no time. Thinking about where you can put your garden, how much space you have, and what you can grow is more than enough to start jotting down your notes and put forward a solid plan to turn your garden dreams into a reality. So what are you waiting for? Go plan that dream garden today!