Seasonal Garden Planning – Below you will find my garden plan for the quarter acre garden we produce. This includes vegetables and some fruits such as strawberries and melons.
As many of you know, this year is going to look a little different for us as we are expecting a baby in June! I have done my best to minimize them as much as possible. Even though I’m sure it doesn’t look like it ?
Seasonal Garden Planning
I would still love to be able to increase our annual vegetable supply as we have in the past and this plan reflects that. Of course, there are always variables and unforeseen things that can happen with my pregnancy and birth. But I plan for the best case scenario because all my other pregnancies and births have been without complications.
Seasonal Planting Diagram In Photoshop
If I feel like the work in the garden is too much or if other things come up, my backup plan is to support some local market garden friends and buy the products I need from them. I don’t usually take this stance, but this year I’m giving myself some grace.
I will be using lots of groundcovers to fill in the empty rows in the garden! This will reduce weeding while increasing fertility. I will also be growing fewer tomatoes this year. I don’t think I’ll have time to keep as many as I usually do, and I also feel like I usually grow so many that I don’t manage them well.
Hopefully with fewer plants and proper management we will still be able to get our year’s supply of tomatoes. The only other thing I cut back on significantly is sweet corn.
For this purpose, I make half the size of the sample I usually grow from sweet corn. If I can handle it after the baby is born, I will do a second round of sweet corn in one of the rows that had spring cover.
A Follow Up To My Last Blog (winter Veggie Escape)
I’m not sure I like where the melons and watermelons are, but other than that I feel good about how things look right now. I’m sure I’ll make some improvements as the 2023 season progresses.
The total size of the main family garden is 100ft x 100ft. An additional garden is also 100ft by 100ft although not all shown on the plan. What is not shown, the cover will be trimmed.
The second garden will have groundcovers in the first three rows and a 14-by-100-foot area for children’s gardens. The children’s area has three garden beds that are 30 inches wide with about 2 feet of walkway between the rows.
The main garden also has 30′ wide rows and an 18′ walking path. The only exception is the rows of crawler tunnels are about 36″ wide with 18″ walkways.
Seasonal Landscape Design
With flower borders along the edges, the actual length of the rows is shorter, about 90 feet per row.
To view our garden plan from 2022, click HERE. And our garden plan from 2020 (old house) is HERE. I was checking around and thought I never posted our 2021 garden plan! One of the blessings of gardening in mild winter areas is the ability to grow lots of vegetables during the fall and winter months. It’s no wonder gardeners love the cool season: there are fewer insects, more rainfall, and less weeds. Also, the list of crops you can grow in the cooler months is surprisingly long if you live west of the Cascades or Sierra Nevada or lower elevations in the Southwest.
To show you what you can grow, we planted two plots of vegetables in a test garden in Menlo Park, California.
One editor once observed, “Gardening is like catching a train. If you’re late, you’re missing out.” Our chart shows you when to plant so you can harvest your fall and winter crops. You can start cool-season vegetables from seed if you sow early enough, or transplant later in the season.
Sopo Cottage: Garden Evolution
The advantage of seeds is their low cost and great variety. You can order from a seed supplier by computer, fax or phone and have almost any variety of vegetable you want within days. Nurseries have seedlings of many winter vegetables, but their selection can be limited.
Dig a lot of compost into the garden soil before planting. Loose, light, well-tilled soil allows roots to penetrate more easily, retains nutrients better and drains well after winter rains.
Since you are starting tender seedlings in the heat of summer, they will need to be shaded with floating row covers after planting. Row covers not only protect young plants from scorching sun, but also help keep insects out and provide frost protection during the cold months.
Fertilize at planting time, then every two months. You can use any complete fertilizer, but in our test garden we only used fish emulsion.
The 2023 Redleaf Garden Plan — Redleaf Ranch
By far the fastest and most efficient way to start a vegetable garden, especially if you have poor soil, is to use raised beds. Raised beds filled with light commercial topsoil provide excellent drainage and warm up quickly in mild, sunny weather. Loose soil is easily penetrated by the roots, which allows carrots and radishes to develop perfectly.
You can frame raised beds with lumber or create unframed beds like ours by building the soil into flat, level mounds about 8 inches high.
If you have space in your garden, try succession planting. Consider lettuce crops that you use up the fastest, such as lettuce and radishes, and then sow ten seeds every two weeks until frost. That way, you’ll have enough plants at all stages of maturity to avoid losses from unseasonal heat or early frost.
Leaf crops produce larger and longer yields per plant if you harvest some of the outer leaves at a time instead of harvesting the entire plant. However, if you see flower buds beginning to appear on any leafy vegetable other than Swiss chard, harvest the entire plant immediately; the flowering process (called bolting) makes the leaves bitter on everything except Swiss chard.
Planting Plans For Multiseason Garden Designs
Between root crops, beets and carrots can stay in the ground until you’re ready to use them. Radishes should be harvested as soon as they are large enough for salads. If you grow onions for green tops, pull them as soon as they are ready; if you are growing bulbs for bulbs, leave them in the ground until next summer.
You can buy seedlings of many winter vegetables at nurseries and garden centers. But for a wider selection, check the nursery seed shelves or order from seed companies. Some good companies are Johnny’s Selected Seeds (207/437-4301), Nichols Garden Nursery (541/928-9280), Renee’s Garden Seeds (888/880-7228), Territorial Seed Company (541/942-9547), and West. Coast Seeds (604/482-8800).Picture an empty 4-ft. x 4ft raised garden bed. Most gardeners would fill this high bed with nine cabbage plants, or hundreds of carrots, or dozens of garlic or onion bulbs, like the traditionally planted bed shown below.
That’s not how I would personally fill those 16 square feet of growing space. I look at the hollow below and see a lot of missed planting opportunities.
I would put an obelisk trellis in the center of the bed and plant it with peas. I then planted garlic, cilantro, dill, kale, swiss chard and parsley around the trellis. I would add rows of carrots next to the big leafy greens and several rows of spinach next to the carrots. Finally, I planted chives, more herbs and flowers around the edge of the bed itself, and if I still had a few spare spots, I added some fast-growing French breakfast radishes.
Vegetable Garden Layout Ideas
This is a planting style in the garden called intensive planting. This may seem very strange to those of you who are used to a more traditional way of planting. It will probably look like we’ve thrown the plant spacing rule book out the window. In fact, we are still giving the plants the space they need to grow, just nothing more. And instead of focusing on one type of plant or a couple of our favorites, we’re going to feature a wide variety of plants that enjoy the same climate.
By packing different plants, the garden is interesting. It’s not just the same peppers and beans every day for months. An intensively planted garden filled with seasonal plants is constantly growing and changing. Every day there is something new and something else ready to harvest.
Let’s take a look at the planting plan so we can explore intensive planting a bit more before we compare it to traditional planting methods.
The goal of a planting plan is basically to leave no space between plants. Every square inch of the garden is covered with a delicious edible plant that produces leaves, roots or eventually fruit that you can harvest and enjoy.
Vegetable Garden Plan
The picture below is a planting plan for a 4 foot height. x 4-foot raised bed during the cool growing season (when temperatures are usually above freezing and below 65 degrees Fahrenheit).
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