Garden Planting Calendar

 I have been working on making my gardening more focused and streamlined, and less experimental and impulse driven.  For me, that means focusing on what works and is the most productive.  The result of this is a gardening calendar that gives me an overview of the entire growing year.  At any given month, I can check the calendar and see what I should have planted in each of the beds, and what is coming up to be harvested.

The calendar is based on four raised beds.  There's also an optional bed for herbs or other experimental crops.  Obviously, this could be four separate beds, or a single garden plot broken into four sections.  I've chosen crops that I like, that are easy to grow and productive in my area.  

If I want to I can change one vegetable for another, or add a new garden bed and start an additional line of plants.  But the idea here is to minimize the chaos and reduce the decision fatigue.  Garlic flows into potatoes, which flows into Fall garlic.

Click on the calendar to expand it to full size.

This calendar tells me a few key points to planning my gardening year:

 

1.  I have scheduled a main crop with an accompanying cool season crop.  The main crop is scheduled for transplanting in May, and being done by September.  The cool season crop takes advantage of the Fall and Spring growing seasons.

2.  The succession companions are always the same.  When the tomatoes are done, the radishes go in.  I don't need to puzzle about what is coming next or which plant strikes my fancy.  I know exactly what I'm going to next.  

 

This allows me to think about succession ahead of time, as well.  So as an example, the heavy feeding tomato is followed by the lighter feeding radish.  The root zone radish breaks up the fibrous root network of the tomato.

3.  Within the vegetable type, I have latitude to select varieties if I want to experiment.   One planting may be of Red Globe radish, while the next might be Daikon, or French Breakfast.

4.  The calendar is designed around specific transition periods.  A spring planting in March is followed by a transition planting in May where 80% of the crops change from cool to warm.  A second transition is in September and cool season plants are done before the first frost.

5.  Cool season crops have the option to come out in November or overwinter to the following spring.  You don't have to overwinter crops every year.  It's perfectly acceptable to leave some or all of your beds fallow some winters.

6.  Two months before transplanting, seeds must be sown indoors so they can be up-potted and ready.  Tomatoes transplanted in May should be sown in March.  Lettuce transplanted in March should be sown indoors in January.  

 

These dates begin to make the calendar quite complicated for a simple graphic, but it's worth developing for a more explicit gardening protocol. 

Daikon Radish Dish