Perhaps you’re new to gardening and want to plant your first garden. Or maybe you were disappointed about how things worked out last season. Regardless, taking the time to plan your garden is important to achieving your goals. We like to do our garden planning during the winter.
We find that evaluating what did and didn’t work last year and dreaming about next year’s garden is the perfect way to pass time during the cold dreary winter months. Winter is a less busy time. Plus, by making plans now we can be sure that we will have everything we need in time. We also won’t miss any critical planting dates if we take the time to notate them ahead of time.
How much planning is required depends on many factors. Factors such as what kind of garden you will be growing, and what you plan to grow yourself vs. what you buy. If you have perennial crops or just annual ones, etc. In addition to planning our season out ahead of time, we find that taking notes throughout the gardening season is very helpful.
Notes can help you to remember what did and didn’t work. Or when you planted or harvested things or when you sprayed pesticides or fungicides. Were there ideas that you wanted to try? When you sit down in January to plan, it can be really hard to remember exactly what happened last July. Keeping good records can revolutionize your gardening experience.
The first thing you need to do is evaluate what your goals are.
Do you want to have cut flowers all summer? Do you want to improve on something that didn’t work out last year? Or maybe you want to grow vegetables? Minimize the number of plantings you have to do? Succeed at growing broccoli without it being eaten by worms? Do you want to have a particular vegetable all season? Do you want a summer garden? One that will continue to provide you with vegetables into the winter? Do you want to minimize the amount of time you spend gardening this year because it’s a busy summer?
You probably get the idea. There is no right or wrong answer. However, taking the time to think about what you want ahead of time allows you to do research or re-evaluate if some of your goals are in opposition to each other. Taking the time to research a new crop you want to try, or a pest problem you’re having ahead of time can sometimes make a huge difference to your success.
Once you’ve figured out the goal, you need to evaluate what you have and what you need to buy. You might need seeds and plants. Or you might need to purchase supplies like row covers stakes or potting mix. Purchasing these sorts of things early gives you access to the best selection. Plus, you will be sure to have everything you need before things get busy in the spring. This is important. Some things are very timing critical, and if you miss your window of opportunity that’s it for the year.
Once you have determined what you need, you need to plan your schedule.
We like to do this on our calendar app so that it will remind us of planting dates. To determine your planting schedule you need to know a few things. You need to know your first and last frost dates, days to maturity for your crops, and how cold tolerant they are.
You can find your average first and last frost dates by doing an internet search for it with your zip code. First and last frost dates are important because they dictate how long your growing season is. They dictate when it’s safe to plant things in the spring. They also tell you when it’s too late to plant to have your crop mature before frost in the fall.
The second thing you need is days to maturity for your plants. This is typically listed on your seed packet somewhere. It may be listed as days to harvest or similar wording. If your seed packet does not tell you, the information should be available online.
Most seed packets will also provide information on direct sowing vs. transplanting, and how soon the plants can be safely planted outside. This is all important to know. If you are unfamiliar with the term, days to maturity, it means how long it takes the seed to go from planting to flowering (for flowers) or harvest (for vegetables). Keep in mind this number is an estimate. Things will grow more slowly in cool weather.
Armed with this information we can start to plan our planting schedule.
For the sake of illustration, we are going to use our zone 8 climate. Our average first and last frost dates are November 5th and April 6th. This means that April 6th is the absolute earliest we can plant out anything frost tender (and that probably waiting a couple weeks longer is best). We also must plant everything early enough to ensure that it is mature or harvested prior to November 5th.
Next, we can divide our seeds into a few different groups. We have the cold crops, warm season crops, and those that we transplant. Transplants can also be broken down into cold vs. warm season crops. This goes for both flower and vegetable seeds. If you are unsure what category a particular plant falls into, go ahead and look it up.
Cold season plants can be planted early in the season, often weeks prior to the last frost date.
The cold season seed packets might say things like ‘plant as soon as the soil can be worked’. They are cold and usually frost tolerant. Warm season plants are tender plants like cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers that need warm temperatures and long days to live. Transplants are things that are started inside, usually 4-6 weeks before your last frost date. This allows them to get a head start which can be particularly important in cooler climates. Transplants come with some advantages. The biggest of which is probably that you get to pick flowers or harvest vegetables sooner.
Many things can be both direct seeded and transplanted.
However, when you are considering whether to transplant or direct seed something you need to pay attention to comparing your days to maturity to growing season length. Many commonly transplanted things have high days to maturity, and the number of days required may exceed the length of your growing season when direct seeded.
To know how late in the season a particular seed can be planted or plant can be transplanted, you need to count back from your first frost date, and make sure that the days to maturity is less. So for example, the end of June is the latest we can plant winter squash (with 100 days to maturity) here and expect a harvest. If we planted it in August, it would not have time to ripen fruit before the plant got frosted.
We also need to decide if a particular plant is something that is planted once a year or succession planted.
Succession planting is planting the same crop repeatedly every few weeks or months. It is typically done with crops that mature rapidly and have short harvest windows. You have to decide if you want to put in the effort to repeatedly plant and remove a crop or whether you are satisfied with one planting. Some examples of things that are commonly succession planted include lettuce, radishes, and sunflowers. Things like peppers and tomatoes are not succession planted. They take a long time to mature and they will continue to produce a harvest as long as they are alive.
To determine whether you can succession plant, and how many successions you can do requires you to look back at your first and last frost dates.
Compare that to the days to maturity. Depending on where you are located, you may need to consider how hot your summers will get. Many cool season crops are not tolerant of the long, hot summer days. They cannot successfully be grown mid-summer, so you also need to take this into consideration.
Lettuce is probably one of the most commonly succession planted crops so let’s use that as an example. It is cold hardy and will germinate in cold soil, but is not heat tolerant. In our climate, we can start planting lettuce about a month before our last frost date–at the beginning of March. We can continue to plant it until about June 1stat which point it will be too hot to continue.
Lettuce reaches maturity in 50 days or less for baby leaves, and it gets bitter quickly as it ages. Thus, if we want a steady supply of lettuce, we need to plant it every 2-4 weeks between March and June. If we wanted fall lettuce, we would count back 50 days from our first frost date of November 5th. We can plant fall lettuce any time up to the end of September, and it will have time to mature before frost.
You shouldn’t have to start from scratch to figure this out for everything if you don’t want to.
There is a good chance that a local university extension will have a published approximate planting dates for your area that can make a good starting point for your planning. Nonetheless, understanding how those recommended dates are determined is important so that you can determine planting dates for things they may have omitted from their publication. Keeping meticulous records year to year will help you to tweak the dates to be ideal for your micro-climate.
So far, we’ve been mainly talking about annual crops, and in many ways perennial crops are a lot easier to plan for. Nonetheless, planning and record keeping is equally as important for perennial crops. If you have fruit trees, timing your pesticide and fungicide application right can make the difference between getting a bumper crop and harvesting nothing. So you should also notate on your calendar things like spray dates and when to start scouting for pests, and also when the pests appeared to help you in future years. Over time you can create a personalized schedule that works best for you.
We hope that this inspires you to spend some of these dreary winter days preparing to make next year’s garden better than ever!
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