How to make a planting calendar (Part 1)

This is the first in a multi-part series on how I developed a comprehensive planting calendar. Read part two here.

Why a Planting Calendar?

At the beginning of this year, I started planning my new garden. This is my first year there, and my biggest garden yet, so I couldn't apply the same principles I've used in years past on my smaller gardens. Also, I wanted to maximize productivity - get plants in sooner, and never leave a bed empty. And of course there's the CSA. I need to provide veggies to the paying subscribers in a quantity and regularity they expect.

The first thing I did was develop a list of crops I wanted to grow during the year. My first list had about 40 crops and zillions of varieties. The seed catalogs all looked too good! But I repeatedly whittled down the list with encouragement from Dan. I went from ten lettuce varieties to four, and from close to a dozen tomatoes to five. I got rid of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and corn altogether due to space limitations and productivity requirements. Eventually I had my crops and varieties.

I knew a bit about yields from years past, and I knew how much my family could eat, so it was simple enough to count up the number of beds I would need for the year's worth of growing. Even with the slimmed-down list, I figured that I would need over twice the number of beds that I had. I knew I could fix some of the problem by succession planting, but it was a daunting task to line up crops one after another because I was not confident in the number of days from "seed in the ground" to "harvested and bare earth". What I needed to do was figure out these numbers for every variety of every crop, and then stack them up in succession throughout the growing season. To complicate things, plants take longer to get going earlier in the season and they bolt faster later in the season.



After doing a bit of research and talking with Dan, I concluded that I needed to put together a spreadsheet with beds down the side (rows) and dates along the top (columns). Simple enough, at least in principle.

The hard part was doing it. And that begins in Part 2. Stay tuned!