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Great garden planning book
I have a confession to make. I am a notorious over planter. Every year I look at the clean slate of my garden beds and I have a very stern conversation with myself. The conversation involves things like being reasonable, planting things that my family will enjoy eating and things that won't necessarily require a lot of extra time to grow.
All bets are off, however, when I step foot into a local nursery or greenhouse. I am enchanted by the tables full of young plants. I carefully read through plant descriptions and before I know it I am standing in line with a cart full of plants that look small and unobtrusive but in a couple of short months later will be fighting for their space in the garden and overloading my kitchen counter with their bounty.
This year, I am making a commitment to myself and my garden. I am not going to overplant. I am not going to plant eggplant, because no matter how beautiful the plants and the fruit are, my family just doesn't eat them. I will grow cucumbers, sweet peas, green beans, and tomatoes. These are fresh crops that my family will eat.
There are many useful tools to help you get your garden planning off to a good start. This year to help keep myself on task and not overplant I have done more than just profess to the universe that I will not overplant.
The first thing I did was buy the book All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. This is a no nonsense approach to planting just the right amount in just the right space. By breaking the garden down into measurable, and thereby manageable, plots, Bartholomew gives gardeners simple instructions on growing only what you need. A friend of mine just started gardening for the first time this year and she and her husband used this book as their guide to getting started. Her husband called it gardening for geeks! Even though all plants start out about the same size, the size they will grow to varies tremendously and it's important to plan ahead to ensure adequate space is allotted for large vegetables like cabbages and tomatoes. This book is also great for the gardener with limited space because you can plan to get the most use out of your limited space and grow more than you thought possible.
The next step in my plan was to test out an online garden planning system. I spend quite a bit of time on the computer every day and so it seemed natural to me to find a software tool that would enable me to plot out and manage my garden. While on Twitter* the other day I came upon the user @plangarden and went to check out their product. I couldn't resist the free 45 day trial and with a price tag of $12 per year for a three year subscription it seems a relatively low cost way to manage my garden using my computer.
Another great tool for the tech savvy gardener is to create a gardening blog to document your gardening. There are many free blog tools to use and a great community of gardening bloggers to interact with and compare gardening stories. Try the web site Stumble Upon to search for organic gardening blogs and garner ideas.
If you're like many gardeners I know, then spending time on your computer is the last thing you want to be doing with your spare time. If this is the case then maintaining a garden journal the old fashion way, with paper and pencil, is the way to go. It may seem like an unnecessary waste of time to keep a gardening journal but the information you store there will be a valuable resource for planning next year's garden. Carefully documenting the location of planting, variety of plants, harvest yields, and weather conditions is a great way to plan and prepare you for the seasons to come. It's also a nice reminder of years gone by.
Check out your local book store, garden center or nursery or online book seller like Amazon or Barnes & Noble to find the journal that is perfect for you. You may find that a spiral notebook and a number two pencil will do the trick, but a set of colored pencils to sketch out a bed would make a nice added touch. Snapshots taped onto pages would also do the trick.
Whether you're a person who works better on the computer or if your style leans more to the traditional pencil and paper there is something for everyone to help with garden planning and documenting. Feel free to share your ideas here in the comments section.
*You can follow me on Twitter! @fruitlady for musings about my daily life or @BeyondOrganic for organic lifestyle information.
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