#Veg garden planner how to#

Find them here: What Do You Want to Grow. Delve deeper into what you want to grow this year with the help of several pages (with worksheets) from my book, Smart Start Garden Planner. I have a special gift to help you through this strategic process. Focus on the five vegetables you eat the most and plan those into your garden first. It may sound obvious, but if you grow what you eat you’ll get much more satisfaction (and savings) from your garden. Review your typical shopping list and deconstruct your favorite meal recipes to see if you can grow any of your household’s most popular vegetables in your garden. What are your favorite weekly go-to meals? What do you eat and buy from the grocery store on a regular basis? The best way to do this is to take a close look at your eating and grocery shopping habits. When starting a small vegetable garden, a critical first step is deciding what to grow. Here are two important things to take into consideration when you’re planning which vegetables to grow in your garden. But, what’s worth it to grow depends upon you – what you like to eat, what you buy on a regular basis, and which vegetables are on your priority list. When you’re tight on space, it’s even more important to plant and grow vegetables that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. We eat a lot of kale in our house, so growing it is a top priority each season. If you have a plot in a community garden, I have some specific tips for making the most of that space, including the best vegetables to grow, in this post. You can always expand your garden in the coming years after you’ve fallen in love with growing your own food. If you’re not sure how much you’ll like growing your own food, or you don’t have a sense of how much time is required, then I suggest starting small. If you’re starting a small vegetable garden or considering downsizing to a smaller garden, you need to be honest with yourself about how much time you truly have to devote to your garden. But, planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting from a garden of this size is a considerable commitment of time for many months of the year.įor me, it’s time I spend joyfully, and I have almost 20 years of gardening experience under my belt. At 1600 square feet I’m able to grow a lot of food for my husband and I. My garden is pretty large, especially for a city lot. A 4’ x 8’ raised bed is a common size, but you can build whatever size fits best in your garden space. If you’re thinking about building raised beds, starting with two or three will allow you to grow a handful of different vegetables and will also be easy to manage. That’s much more manageable for most busy folks.Īnd, surprisingly, you can actually grow a lot of food in a small plot like that if you garden efficiently. There were a lot of gardens that got overtaken by weeds and were suffering from neglect.Ī more appropriate plot for beginning gardeners would have been about half that size, 10’x10’. Over time, I noticed that for many gardeners this size was often too big for them to keep up with. After working in my own plot, I often took strolls around the garden to see what other people were growing.

I had a plot in a community garden for many years and the standard sized space was 20’ x 20’. One thing that’s often not shared is how many hours it takes to maintain these large spaces. Try not to be overly influenced by the many photos on social media romanticizing huge gardens and mini-farms.

#Veg garden planner how to#

How to Make the Most of Your Small Vegetable Garden So, if you’re new to gardening, I encourage you to keep it simple and start small this season.Īnd if you’ve already hopped on the tiny garden bandwagon, here are my top tips on how to start a small vegetable garden and make the most of it so that it’s bursting with produce this year. You’re more likely to be successful, which means you’re going to have a lot more fun.Īnd greater success will make you excited about continuing to garden the following season, and hopefully for many more seasons after that! It’s much easier to keep up with a small garden during the busy summer season. Over the years I’ve met thousands of gardeners who get excited about the idea of growing their own food and then dig up a huge section of their yard. If you said, “starting with a garden that’s way too big”, you’re right! If you had to guess, what’s the most common mistake beginning gardeners make?