Planting Plan

Using smartgardener.com (which is free by the way, and fun to use), I was able to formulate a plan for my entire spring's worth of planting and harvesting.  I did succession planting as every 2 weeks.

Below is an example of how I used the SmartGardener program.  You can pick the variety of plant that you want, and it will show you the year's plan depending upon whether you want to start it indoors or outdoors.  The light teal is indoor planting, dark teal transplant, dark olive sowing outdoors (if it's long, you can do succession planting), light olive caring for the plant, and rust is the proposed harvest time. 

Bull's blood beet... my favorite salad "green" so far!

You can also see that there is a recommended amount of plants for you to grow.  If you go into the Settings section of the website, you can enter the number of adults and children you are feeding, and it will estimate how many you should grow.  Of course, this is a rough guideline, so if you like to freeze pesto, grow 300 basils!

I'm going to be adding in a few things to the plan, especially doing the long black radishes quite early (starting now to try it), since I want to be able to pull them as I transfer tomato seedlings into their place. 

Let's take a look at a summary of my SmartGardener plan:

("plant" means planting directly in outdoor soil, "radish 3" means the third round of succession planting)

• February
• Week 1:  plant garlic
• Week 2:  start tomatoes, peppers, thyme indoors
• Week 3:  plant arugula 1
• March
• 1:  plant kale, radish, turnip
• 2:  start basil indoors.  plant carrot, arugula 2
• 3:  transplant thyme outdoors.  plant beet, kale 2, radish 2, turnip 2
• 4:  start squash indoors.  plant beet 2
• April
• 1:  plant chard, sage, radish 3, turnip 3
• 2 (after last frost!):  transplant basil, squash, tomato.  plant calendula, cilantro, lettuce, nasturtium, red malibar spinach, sunflower.  start arugula harvest.
• 3:  plant cucumber, chard 2, sage 2, radish 4
• 4:  plant summer squash, calendula 2, cilantro 2, lettuce 2, red malibar spinach 2, sunflower 2.  start beet, radish harvest
• May
• 1:  transplant pepper.  plant tomato, basil, winter squash, cucumber 2, lettuce 3, radish 5.  start turnip, carrot harvest.
• 2:  plant summer squash 2, sunflower 3
• 3:  plant basil 2, radish 6
• 4:  plant winter squash 2, sunflower 4.  start cilantro, garlic, kale harvest
• June
• 1:  plant basil 3, radish 7.  last chance to replant any squash not doing well.  start chard, nasturtium harvest.
• 2:  plant sunflower 5.  start calendula, cucumber, lettuce, squash, tomato harvest.  
• 3:  plant radish 8
• 4:  start thyme harvest
• July
• 1:  start basil, sage, sunflower, pepper harvest
• 2:  plan out the fall plantings, they start next month
• August
• 1:  start last round of radish harvest
• 2:  start squash harvest, and any harvest of direct-to-outdoors planted basil and tomatoes.

Well, there you have it!  A solid plan for all the spring's plantings.  If you know your last frost date, feel free to use the plan and adjust it to your needs.  I used the most conservative last frost date I found, rather than the average frost date, because I didn't want to risk losing all my tomato seedlings, for example.  I'll see how it goes this year, and adjust the plans next year.

Or you can figure out a plan for yourself using these resources:

SmartGardener  (puts my last frost date as April 9)

USDA Plant Hardiness Zones  (I'm a Zone 9b)
 


How do you go about planning your garden?