Plan Your Garden For Success
A great garden starts with a great plan! Whether you are brand new to gardening or a seasoned garden pro, you can plan your garden for success!
In this article, we will be going over garden setup, deer protection, starting a garden on a budget, deciding what to grow, calculating how much of each vegetable to plant and estimating yields, survival gardening, when to plant and how to plan your garden for seed saving.
Plan Your Garden
Gardening for Beginners
Growing what you like to eat is probably my number one tip on gardening for beginners!
When deciding what to grow in your garden, take a look in your fridge! Think about what vegetables you buy in the store, and what vegetables you will actually eat!
If your family isn’t so into greens, maybe a salsa garden with tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, onions and garlic would be a better way to go! More fun options include potatoes or sweet potatoes, spices, pumpkins for pumpkin pies, melons and even berries!
If you are new to gardening, some of the easiest vegetables to start growing are green beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, lettuce, garlic and root vegetables, depending on your climate.
You will definitely want to check out this page on gardening for beginners, which goes into more detail on the easiest plants to start with, soil type, frost dates, cool crops vs. heat loving crops, choosing seeds and more!
Gardening on a Budget
If you are trying to plan your garden for the first time, it’s easy to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on things you don’t really need.
For most of my adult life, I’ve lived on a really tight budget. Currently, I’m a stay-at-home mom with four kids. We mainly live off my husband’s income. Some years it’s been extremely tight, but I’ve still managed to have a garden for cheap or even for free (and a large one at that!).
In this article, you’ll find tips for cheap or free fencing, garden setup, compost, seeds and more!
How to Grow Your Own Food
Did you know we have a reference page where you can find instructions for growing 115 different foods at home?
You can find detailed instructions for dozens of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, sweeteners, meat, dairy and herbs right in your backyard!
If you would like to plan your garden to grow something new this season, you will definitely want to check out the resources on this page!
Garden Fencing
Deer are beautiful animals, but unfortunately they can be a death sentence for your garden. I have gardened on some properties where they have never been an issue, some where they are a nuisance, and some where they will literally devour an entire garden.
If you are going to be depending on your homegrown food and want to be sure to plan your garden for success this year, I would recommend putting in some type of deer fence to be on the safe side.
In this article, I go over some of the cheap or free deer fencing options I have personally tried and how they work. You’ll also find instructions and a link for setting up my favorite sturdy, affordable deer fencing using T posts and heavy duty plastic mesh.
Prioritizing What to Grow
Survival Gardening
Throughout much of history, the survival garden has just been a matter of fact. Before modern grocery stores, if you didn’t grow your own food, or purchase it from a farm nearby, you probably weren’t going to eat.
Now, we are so detached from where our food comes from, with our food shipped into the supermarkets from around the world, neatly packaged and all available in one convenient place. We are definitely spoiled!
But the scary downside to our modern grocery supply chain is how vulnerable it is to any type of crisis. You may have heard on the news, when there is a hurricane or a winter storm, or prolonged power outage, the grocery store can be emptied in hours. And we definitely have seen that recently with the health crisis!
Our top 8 crops for a survival garden include garlic, potatoes, berry bushes, fruit and nut trees, winter squash, parsnips, salad greens and beans.
If you are planning on survival gardening, it’s important to learn to garden ahead of time. You don’t want to start from scratch trying to figure it out when your life depends on it!
If you aren’t that interested in gardening, just try growing a few things for one year. This will teach you some of the skills you’ll need and you’ll be far more prepared in a survival situation!
Read more about survival gardening here!
The Modern Victory Garden
In WWI, the United States government distributed flyers encouraging its citizens to “Sow the seeds of victory.” With Europe at war, many of its farms became battlefields and its farmers became soldiers. Americans were asked to grow and store as much of their own food as they could, so that more could be sent to our European allies. During this time period, American families grew a large percentage of their own food. And so began the “Victory Garden.”
This victory garden concept has been copied in many countries throughout the world in times of crisis.
This sample victory garden layout focuses on calories, protein, crops that are easy to grow and easy to store, and also includes fruit to provide variety and nutrition. If you are not able to keep farm animals, this garden could supply most of a family’s nutritional needs. If you have the space, you can add corn to this plan, which is the easiest grain to grow and process by hand. If you want to plan your garden so your family is less reliant on the grocery store, this is a great place to start!
Get our full victory garden plan here!
How Big Should Your Garden Be?
Honestly it’s really hard to set a certain amount of space that you need for a garden. That’s because the quantity of food you’ll be able to grow in a certain garden spot varies so much.
Are you a beginning gardener? Do you have poor soil? How long is your growing season? All these factors will drastically affect your garden yields.
To get the best idea of how much space you need, you really need to just start growing and keep notes.
But to get you started, I’ll share the stats for one of the gardens we’ve had.
Two years ago we had two separate gardens we shared with four families. The total garden space was about 1/4 acre and fed 12 people. This included a wide variety of all the vegetables we could eat and preserve, 1200lbs of winter squash, 500lbs of potatoes, sweet corn and popcorn, enough root vegetables for winter and berry bushes. It didn’t include our space for fruit/nut trees and we only grew fresh green beans, not dried that year (since we had a dairy animal, chickens and animals for meat, the protein from beans wasn’t a priority). We had 97 days between frosts that summer and most of the garden was established garden space with good soil.
Homestead Planning
With so many crises in the world today, we have made some changes to what we grow in our own garden and on our farm the past few years.
Growing as much of your food as you can frees up what’s in the grocery stores for the people who aren’t able to grow their own. It will also give your family the food security you need to get through what is coming in the world today.
Our priorities for growing food are as follows:
- Storable calories
- Protein
- Variety for nutrients
Last year we grew about 75% of our food ourselves. This year we are hoping to up that number by adding back in flour corn and dried beans, which we did not grow last season.
There are tons of gardening methods out there, but if you are depending on your garden to feed your family in 2023, limit your experimenting and stick with what you know works when you plan your garden!
Find out more about our garden priorities here!
How Much and When to Plant
Calculating How Much to Plant Per Person
Although there are tons of variables when it comes to estimating your yield, that doesn’t mean you have to “wing it”. Use our calculating system to figure out how much of each vegetable your family needs and how many plants you will need to reach that number. This will get you much closer to your goals than just guessing!
Step 1: Keep a record of how much of each vegetable you grow each year so you can make adjustments based on your actual harvest amounts in your garden.
Step 2: Make a list estimating how much of eat crop you will eat per week multiplied by the number of weeks you will be eating that vegetable. For example, you might want two winter squash per week for the fall and winter. 2 per week times 25 weeks = 50 squash total.
Step 3: Take a look at our list below of estimated yields to calculate how much you need to plant to grow enough for your family’s needs. If your winter squash variety produces the average of 2-3 fruits per plant, you’d need about 20 plants to produce 50 winter squash.
Step 4: Be sure to include succession planting for quick maturing crops. You don’t want to end up with 60 heads of lettuce all ready the same week and none the rest of the season!
Calculating How Much to Plant Per Person for a Year of Abundance
Planting Schedule
The timing of when to start seeds indoors or plant them in your garden varies drastically with your location and frost dates.
We are in zone 5, with a last frost date around June 5 and a first frost date around early September.
You can find our zone 5 planting schedule here.
If you are in a different gardening zone, ask local gardeners when they start their seeds, or check out Gilmour’s interactive planting calendar.
Plan Your Garden For Seed Saving
Finally, if you are planning on saving seeds from your garden, you should arrange your seed crops to minimize unwanted crosses between different varieties.
For example, bean varieties can cross with other varieties, and should be planted 50′ apart if you want to be sure different kinds don’t cross. Biennials such as root crops and the cabbage family need two seasons to produce seed, and at least 6 plants flowering together for pollination. This is all important to keep in mind as you plan your garden!
If you want to save seeds, you will want to choose open-pollinated (“OP”) or heirloom seeds, not hybrid (“F1”).
We have tons of seed saving resources on our website. Get started here!
You May Also Like
65 Gifts for Homesteaders
Why Save Seeds from Your Garden?
