If you’re a northener, planning a vegetable garden may not be up there on your list of priorities right now. But here in north Texas, this is the time to create a garden plan for next spring. While planning my garden a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t realize how close I was cutting it until I looked at the first planting date for broccoli and cabbage:
December 23.
It wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that I’m creating new beds that need to be filled with potting soil. (For those of you blessed to live in the north, where soil is black, fluffy and fertile, understand that down here in Texas, it is not.)
Regardless of where you live, learning how to plan a garden is vital to assuring a bumper crop. The old adage, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” never had a more apropos application than to gardening. Whether you’re new to gardening, or not-so-new but have had trouble with consistent results because you’ve never created a vegetable garden plan, the following five steps about how to plan a vegetable garden will be a great help.
1. Decide what to grow, and how much of each plant.
Be realistic. If you’ve just had a baby, a single pepper or tomato plant in a pot will be plenty, believe me. If you want to reduce the cost of your food budget by about 25%, you may choose to grow enough lettuce to replace what you usually buy from the store. Or you may be at a place in your life where you have the time and inclination to try to grow 75% or more of your family’s vegetables.
Whatever decision you make along these lines will enable you to figure out how much yard space you’ll need and where to put your garden, if you don’t already have one.
2. Research planting dates.
For maximum gardening success, make sure you know the start and end dates for planting each crop. For example, if I plant broccoli at the end of March, I’m not going to get any broccoli. It gets too warm too fast in the spring around here. If my mother in Minnesota plants broccoli at the end of March, however, she has a lot better chance of reaping a harvest a couple of months later.
3. Write out the plan on graph paper.
Graph paper is a key tool if you use the Square Foot Gardening method, like I do. But even if you don’t, it greatly facilitates the space-planning aspect of creating a vegetable garden plan. Draw out your beds proportionately, such as one square inch equal to one square foot, and divide them into sections.
Right next to the fence--as north as I could get it!
4. Plan to keep tall plants on the north side of the garden.
Cucumber, tomatoes, peas, pole beans and any squash or melon you want to train vertically will cast a shadow. Plan for the shorter plants to grow on the south side of the taller ones. If you want to try growing lettuce in the heat of the summer, however, do the opposite. Having a plot of greens on the north side of, say, tomatoes may actually help them to grow without developing that bitter taste they tend to get when exposed to the summer sun.
5. Label the sections with the vegetables and planting dates.
On my plan, I have one bed with four square feet of peas, then the next row of squares labeled with “cilantro” and “nasturtium”. In another bed, I have several squares with tomatoes, with the next row of squares alternating various flowers and herbs. Writing the planting dates on the garden layout saves you from having to run from your plan to a calendar or daytimer and back again.
Since I use the square foot gardening method, I also often write out how many plants go in each square foot.
Have I got you excited about planning a vegetable garden? Good! Let’s form a club. 
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never heard of the square foot gardening method… very interesting!
Growing Vegetables´s last blog ..Vegetable Planting Guide