Early Organization of the Garden

In one of my last posts discussing getting your garden prepared in the winter, I spoke on the importance of planning your garden early. I truly believe that the early planning of a garden is one of the most critical steps to having a successful harvest in the summer months.

If you are like me (read: procrastinator) than planning something 4 months in advanced seems a bit daunting. But the good news is that it can be broken down into multiple steps and it really doesn't have to be super complicated as evidenced by my hand drawings of my future garden.

And there it is. Proof of my walking the walk. As you can see, I clearly did not go to great lengths to make this a complicated venture. Just a pencil, notebook paper and some foresight as to what I might want to plant where. I do not have a very large city lot and this drawing is certainly not to scale but I try to make the best use of the space that I do have. Other things that I keep in mind are my own crop rotation cycle as well as what kind of sun each area gets. There are some sites on my property that only get partial sun and remain in the shade for the better part of the afternoon. I am able to grow things in these spots but only certain crops will work. For instance, some crops such as lettuce, spinach, green onions and cilantro have all done really well in partial sun but things like tomatoes and peppers would almost surely fail. If anyone has any questions about crop rotation or the difference between full sun and partial sun/shade crops, please let me know so I can perhaps write a post addressing these issues.

The other thing I addressed while doing this planning is making an itemized list of all of the viable seeds, vegetable and flower, that I had in my stock. I checked the dates on all of the seeds and determined if they might still be good by checking this site on the potential seed expirations. After gathering a list of what I already have, I made a list of what seeds I would need to purchase. You may even want to do this step first if you are not sure of what you are going to plant.

Hopefully by showing you one of the first steps I take in getting my garden prepped in January, it will inspire you to do the same. I promise you that when you plan ahead for your garden in this manner, your garden will be in much better shape to succeed before you even put a seed in the ground.