Before you rush out and plant a garden, spend a little time thinking about how you cook and how your family eats. Do you like salads, low-calorie cooking, pasta, or hearty chowders and stews. Is your garden primarily a summer garden? Will you grow a winter garden as well?
What you find to eat in your garden also depends on the season. In some areas of the country, you can grow lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers all together during the summer. In the warmer areas, lettuce and other greens are grown in the spring and fall; tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and similar vegetables are grown in the summer.
After you make your choices, you can then select the number of plants you need from the chart below.
Number of Plants Per Person
VEGETABLE PLANTS PER PERSON
Bean, snap 2-3
Bean, snap (pole) 1-2
Bean (shell) 3-4
Beet 10-20
Brussels sprouts 1
Cabbage 2
Cabbage, Chinese 2-3
Carrot 30-50
Cauliflower 6-10
Celeriac 1
Celery 1-2
Collards 2-5
Corn, sweet 5-6
Cucumber 1-2
Eggplant 1
Garlic 4
Kale 2-3
Kohlrabi 4-6
Leek 6-10
Lettuce, head 3-4
Lettuce, leaf 2-4
Melon 2
Mustard 4-6
Okra 1-2
Onion 10-30
Parsnip 3-4
Pea, snap 3-4
Pepper 1-2
Potato 1-2
Pumpkin 1
Radish 20-60
Rutabaga 3-6
Salsify 2-10
Shallot 4-10
Spinach 3-7
Spinach, New Zealand 5
Squash, summer 1
Squash, winter 2
Sweet potato 2
Swiss chard 1
Tomato 2
Tomato, paste 3
Turnip 8-15
Watermelon, bush 1
What Else Would You Like?
Consider what else you want out of a garden. Do you want to plant flowers among the vegetables, partially because some of them repel insects and nematodes, or they have beneficial effects for the other vegetables. Edible flowers add color and taste to salads, and some flowers have such sweet scents they attract bees and hummingbirds to the garden.
Some of the favorite edible flowers are nasturtiums, petals of calendula, cornflower or bachelor’s button, some scented leaf geraniums, marigold if they have lemon or citrus in their name, pansies and violas, sunflower, violets and even lilac.
Plants that Attract Hummingbirds
If you plant your garden in the spring when it’s attractive to birds you may have to plant most crops under row covers. If you’re a bird lover, concentrate on hummingbirds: they make for good natural insect control since they regularly pick off insects. They also gather nectar from flowers with their needlelike bills and long tongues. Some suggestions are columbine, coral bells, sage, fuchsia, monkey flower, gilia, honeysuckle, or butterfly bush.
Seed Shopping by Catalog
Garden catalogs are essential tools for planning your garden. The seed catalogs I’ve selected and listed here (see SEED SOURCE) have unique personalities and a seed selection you’ll never find on the seed racks. Before you start your garden, I suggest you send for some of these catalogs, or go to their on-line sites (I’ve listed these). Pre-planning starts in winter when the new varieties come out. If you’re use to planting only hybrid vegetables, check out the heirloom seed catalogs, you’ll be in for a treat.
Other Considerations
Your garden will need to be defined by the number of hours you’re willing to spend each week in your garden, how much money you can afford to put into your garden, the space you have available, how your garden fits into your yard, and what site makes the most sense. You’ll also have to decide whether you’re going to garden at ground level or in raised beds, and whether you want to include a special garden for the kids.
Here’s a checklist:
- What do I really want to grow?
- Do I want a combination in-ground and container garden?
- How big should I make my garden?
- How much time do I have to spend each week?
- Can I integrate my garden into my landscaping?
- Do I want raised beds?
- Do I need to grow my garden against a fence to support my vine plants?
- Do I want to garden vertically?
- Does pocket gardening make sense in my yard?
- Do I want to grow enough vegetables to freeze or can?
How to Design Your Garden
By proper placement of individual vegetables in your intensive postage stamp garden, you can produce extremely large quantities of vegetables in an extremely small space. Here are the planning rules that will help you obtain maximum results:
- Plant tall vegetables on the north end of your garden to avoid shading the smaller crops, and plant the other vegetables in descending order of size down toward the south end of the garden.
- Forget about planting in rows. You can scatter the seeds to use all the space in your garden, and then thin out the seedlings (the small plants) as they come up. If you set out seedlings rather than seeds, space them without concern for straight rows. The mature plants should just touch one another on all sides.
- If your plot is large–say 10 by 10 feet or even 8 by 8 feet–you can plant different types of vegetables in separate squares or rectangles. In plots more than 5 or 6 feet wide, you’ll need pathways in order to reach all your plants. However, if the plot is narrow or small, simply block out irregular groups of vegetables and fill in the spaces any way you wish. (A wider bed seems to be okay for men, but as a woman gardener, I prefer my beds to be no wider than 3-4 feet, the length doesn’t matter. This way we can reach the vegetables from either side of the bed).
- For root vegetables (such as carrots and beets), leafy vegetables (such as lettuce and spinach), and corn you need a special plan. The areas chosen for each of these vegetables should be subdivided into thirds, or fourths, and each subsection should be seeded or planted a week to ten days apart. In this way you get continual harvests–as one subsection stops bearing mature vegetables, another begins. This is not so with, for example, tomatoes and cucumbers, which bear from the same plant over a long period of time. After you’ve harvested a subsection of leafy or root vegetables, you can replant that subsection. This way your garden will produce everywhere all the time.
- Use the air space above your garden as much as possible. That is, train tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vines and trailing plants to grow up trellises, fences, or poles, so that they won’t run all over your garden bed, crowding out the other plants. The better you get at vertical gardening, the more things you’ll be able to pack into your garden.
- Don’t limit yourself necessarily to vegetables. Always include marigolds and herbs in your garden. You’ll love the fragrance and color of a vegetable garden grown this way. Equally important, many veteran gardeners feel that herbs and some flowers have a tremendous beneficial effect on garden health.
Putting Your Garden on Paper
Begin by putting your garden plan on paper, even if it is a small garden. Some gardeners draw this plan to scale (for example, making 1/4 inch equal 1 foot), which allows them to allocate space accurately. Others simply draw a rough sketch and go from there. Graphing allows you to easily plant in small groups. You can count the number of plants, or even seeds, that you are going to use.
To help make this process easier, some garden catalogs like Territorial and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and several other seed catalogs include garden planners. I recommend www.plangarden.com.
Here are a few tips:
- Major vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants should be surrounded by secondary vegetables or herbs: green onions, bush beans, celery. Plant vegetables that mature quickly between those that mature more slowly. For instance, plant radishes in the same space in which you have transplanted tomatoes. Harvest the radishes four to five weeks before the tomato plant takes over the space. You can also use this same space underneath the grown tomatoes as a microclimate for radishes in warm weather to ensure a continuous supply of radishes long after they stop growing in the regular garden.
- Plant vines (cucumbers, melons, peas, some beans, squash) against a fence or support at the north end of your garden. This ensures that the smaller plants get enough sun each day and keeps them from being shaded out by the taller plants. Use smaller vertical supports within the interior of the garden. These can be planted with bush varieties of cucumbers and winter squash.
- Include herbs and flowers in every garden. Certain plants can repel or attract insects. Borage, for instance, can attract bees, while marigolds are said to keep bean beetles away from snap beans and to repel nematodes. Garlic and chives may repel aphids. I urge you to put herbs and flowers among the vegetables when you have the space.
- Plan successive plantings of such vegetables as bush beans, lettuce, and radishes. This ensures a continued supply of these vegetables throughout the growing season.
- Make sure you space all major plants properly on your plan. Winter squash, for instance, requires at least 12 inches between plant centers (if grown up a fence.) This means that if you have a 5-by-5-foot garden, you can plant six squash across the north end to grow up the vertical support frame.