January Planning Series Part 1: 5 Questions to Guide Your Planning
Some people think that having a successful garden requires knowing a lot about plants and doing things “correctly,” but we disagree. In reality, not every garden produces county fair blue ribbon produce or gets featured in magazines. But the best garden for YOU is a space that meets your needs and takes into account your specific desires and current capacity, while factoring in tried-and-true plant wisdom.
Intention + Information = Your perfect Garden Plan
In order to create a plan like this — for ourselves and the Tennessee Kitchen Gardens clients — we’ve developed and use the process outlined below. Simply answer the following 5 questions in order. Your response to #1 informs #2 and so on, and when you get to the end of the list, you’ll have created a diagram and a schedule for the coming garden season, perfectly suited to your needs and growing conditions. This is your framework to build your garden on, knowing that mother nature never lets us execute the plan EXACTLY as we envisioned.
Repeat this process every year as your goals and experiences change and influence your plan. Ready? Grab your garden journal and let’s dig in!
1. WHY?
The first thing to get clear in your mind is why YOU want to garden. There are dozens, if not hundreds of good reasons to grow a garden, but which ones are most important to you? The person who wants to grow food for a large family is going to create a much different garden plan from the person who wants to experiment with growing unusual plants. They will choose different varieties, they will allocate space differently, and they will schedule out planting and harvesting at different times. It’s also important to keep your priorities and motivation in mind when you are reading gardening advice or shopping for supplies and plants. It can be tempting to follow every expert’s advice or to purchase all the cool new plants at the garden center, but taking a second to check in with yourself about whether this tip or seed packet will actually get you closer to your goals can help you avoid wasting time and money. Some of the many reasons for gardening are listed below. Try to identify your Top 2 or 3 and keep them in mind as you ask yourself the next questions.
Access to safe, fresh, organic food
Feeding a large family
Saving money on groceries
Exploring your creativity
Having a beautiful spot to inspire and/or entertain
Learning something new
Spending time outside
Spending time with kids, partners, or older folks
Connecting with nature, God, or something bigger
Slowing down and reducing stress
Getting exercise
Lessening environmental impact
Being more self-reliant
Honoring a loved one
Something else?
2. WHAT?
Once you’re clear on why, it’s much easier to determine what to grow. Using the same example, the gardener who’s feeding a family might choose to grow just the foods that their kids enjoy, selecting varieties that are reliable producers and disease-resistant, or foods that provide significant calories like potatoes or carrots. The experimental gardener might select 7 different varieties of tomatoes and enjoy comparing the taste of all of them, or mix in various companion flowers with their veggies to monitor the effect on insects.
While your intention is helpful in determining WHAT to grow, information starts to become a major asset in this step. What plants ARE disease resistant? What companion plants HAVE been shown to draw beneficial insects?
Make an initial list of plants you are excited about using the prompts below, then do a bit more research on each plant to make sure it fits your goals and capacity, and perhaps even refine your selections down to specific varieties that meet your needs or tastes.
What do you and your family love to eat?
What produce items are expensive at the store?
What tastes better when it's allowed to ripen on the vine? For me, it’s tomatoes and melons.
What goes bad in the fridge because you can't eat it fast enough? Spinach, ewww.
What just seems fun and interesting to try to grow?
What reminds you of grandma or the area where you grew up?
Don’t forget flowers! These support beneficial insects, beauty, and nostalgia and are great for bringing color inside the house.
3. HOW MUCH?
Just like the question of “what,” deciding how much to grow requires combining your intention with reliable information. Perhaps you want to grow enough tomatoes to make plenty of jars of salsa, but how many tomato plants will that take? Because of the unique conditions in your garden and the unpredictability of the weather, it’s not possible to say exactly, but the list below will give you a general idea of how much you can expect to harvest from each type of plant. Use this list to determine how many plants you should grow to meet your needs. You can also look back at past years’ journals to help inform your decision. Did three jalapeño plants provide way more than you could use? Cut back to one this year.
The following are estimates of you can expect during the harvest window, usually lasting about 2-3 weeks.
Some plants are "one and done"and you harvest the whole thing at once, i.e., one cabbage plant=one head of cabbage. This list includes broccoli (one main head with a few extra spears later), cauliflower, cabbage, head lettuce, beets, carrots, leeks, onions, radish, turnip, parsnips. Also daffodils, tulips, alliums, single stem sunflowers, and stock. Plant several (or dozens) if you really like them.
These leafy veggies are "cut-and-come-again," and will give you a few leaves per plant every few days: arugula, chard, collards, kale, leaf lettuce, mustard greens, spinach. Brussels will provide a few sprouts per plant every few days. Gomphrena, zinnias, cosmos, snapdragons, bachelor's buttons, nigella, carnations, and dahlias are all "cut-and-come-again" flowers, meaning they continue to produce blooms on new stems.
Almost all the herbs can be continually cut, so 1 planting of each type is usually enough for fresh eating. More plants will produce enough to dry for year-round use. Grow 2-4 basil plants if you want a big harvest for pesto.
Peas and green beans will produce a 2-4 pods per day per plant or more, so plant 10-20 plants to serve beans for dinner a couple of times a week.
Melons and winter squash will produce 2-3 fruits per plant.
Cucumbers, summer squash, okra, and eggplants will produce about 1-2 fruits per week, per plant, or more.
One cherry tomato plant will produce about a pint of fruit per week, or more. One slicer tomato plant will produce 2-3 fruits per week.
4. WHEN?
When to plant and harvest isn’t really an individual preference, every plant has adapted and evolved to thrive in specific weather and climate conditions. Different parts of a plant's life cycle are triggered by cues like air and soil temperature, day length, and moisture. As gardeners, we are most successful when we plant crops at a time and temperature that they prefer. You may know that certain plants can't survive a frost, but there are also many plants that can't tolerate heat. Learning and accepting these patterns takes patience, but ultimately results in bigger harvests with less stress, along with months and months of blooms and harvests.
We divide plants into groups based on the season they grow best in. Cross-reference your plant list with the chart below to schedule out your planting dates.
Adding all these dates to your calendar at the beginning of the year keeps you on track to provide the best environment to suit a plant’s needs. Keep in mind, these are only estimates. The weather is unpredictable and you may need to move planting dates up or back a week or two depending on the actual forecast around the time you plan to plant. The middle column below are summer veggies. Those will need to go in after all chance of frost has passed, typically mid- to late-April.
5. WHERE?
Now that you have your plant list for each season, it’s time to decide where to place them in your garden. Again, you’ll want to lean a bit heavier on the information known about a plant than your intention for growing it. Factors like sun exposure, soil quality, moisture, and proximity to other plants and wildlife will definitely affect the health and beauty of your garden veggies and flowers. Tomatoes grow best in 8+ hours of sun, with their roots in nutrient-rich moist soil, and no matter if you are growing them for fun, or to feed a family, or to forego the corporate food distribution chain, the tomato plants still want the same conditions.
If you have multiple locations that provide the same or similar conditions, then you can also factor in your personal needs and desires. Maybe you think front yard vegetables are a cool statement. Or maybe you will decide to plant your child’s favorite foods near the border of a bed where they can easily tend and harvest for themselves.
Tennessee Kitchen Gardens uses the Intensive Planting method which maximizes production in a small space, reduces pest and weed pressure, and looks gorgeous—abundant and colorful. To plan the “where” of your garden in our style, draw out a map of your garden beds using graph paper, then allocate space for each plant using the steps below.
Place climbing plants near vertical support trellises. These include tomatoes, cucumbers, snap peas, pole beans, and small melons.
Place large plants near the center zone of the beds with at least a 1 foot diameter of space around them. These take the longest to mature, usually 8-12 weeks, so they are out of your way when placed in the center of the bed. Large plants include broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages, kale, and Brussels sprouts in cool weather; and peppers, eggplants, okra, and summer squash in warm seasons. If your garden is next to a wall or fence, these plants would go at the back.
Place herbs and flowers near the permitter zone of the beds, generally spaced 12 inches apart. These create a beautiful border for your beds, full of color and scents that can distract and deter pests. These are also harvested regularly, so putting them near the border provides easy access.
Between these two zones, plant medium sized plants that have a quicker harvest time than the big plants, typically 4-8 weeks. These include lettuce, spinach, arugula, beets, carrots, radish, bok choy, and bush beans. Onions, leeks, and garlic can be scattered throughout the mid-zone.
Some plants are EXTRA large or for other reasons don’t play well when they are planted in the beds with everything else. For these, we generally recommend giving them their own bed. These include corn (you need to plant it in a big block), sweet potatoes, winter squash, and melons which all need room to ramble. Anything in the mint family can aggressively spread via underground runners and is best in a pot on its own.
Check out the short video below to see how I’d fit lots of spring veggies into a garden with two 4’x8’ raised beds.
Once you’ve answered these five questions, your garden plan is in great shape. Now it’s time to gather seeds and plants and put your first planting date on the calendar.
You might still be feeling a bit nervous and thinking, “Wait! I’ve got one more question. HOW do you garden?” That’s a bigger topic that we can cover in one article, but we answer lots of gardening questions in this blog regularly. You may want to start with this article on which plants you can grow from seed.
Or subscribe to our newsletter for bi-weekly garden tips. If this all feels too much, we also offer one-on-one coaching in your garden with custom advice tailored to your space and experience or full-service planning and planting for those who need more support. We’d love to work alongside you.
Happy planning and happy gardening!
