7 Steps to Planning Your Entire Garden Year - Ep. 234

[00:00:00] All this month we've been talking about garden planning because it's that time. The slower month of January means taking the time to really figure out what we want to grow in the garden and last week we talked about how to fit it all in. This week we're talking about my secret weapon to keeping on track, the humble calendar. This may not seem like a big deal but let me tell you my entire operation is run on a calendar that I put together in January and it is the key to how productive my gardens are.

[00:00:30] It does not matter how big or small your garden is although the bigger the garden the more you really need a calendar to keep you on track. But even small gardens have certain tasks that need to be performed at certain times to optimize the harvest whether that's fertilizing, pruning, trellising, or succession planting.

[00:00:48] Today on Just Grow Something we're completing the planning puzzle by filling out our calendar. We'll talk about the general information that you should be putting on the calendar and then we'll do a detailed look at how to decide what goes in the calendar and where. By the end you will see why it's so important to track these tasks early on so nothing gets missed. Let's dig in.

[00:01:12] Hey, I'm Karen. I started gardening in a small corner of my suburban backyard and now 18 years later I've got a degree in horticulture and operate a 40 acre market farm. I believe there is power in food and that everyone should know how to grow at least a little bit of their own. On this podcast I share evidence-based techniques to help you plant, grow, harvest, and store all your family's favorites. Consider me your friend in the garden. So grab your garden journal and a cup of coffee and get ready to just grow something.

[00:01:50] This is your last call to register for my plan like a pro course if you want to be a part of the live training and Q&A session next week along with getting my feedback on your garden plan. For those of you who were students in a previous year, I have just added a much requested workbook to the curriculum.

[00:02:08] So get in there and download that to use alongside the videos and the other downloads as you plan again this year. If you are not registered, justgrowsomethingpodcast.com slash pro. That's where you go. I will leave the link in the show notes. Now if you don't think that you need a full-blown course to walk you through all the steps that we've talked about this month or it's just not in the budget to invest in a class, I get that and I've got you covered.

[00:02:36] The workbook that I just mentioned is available for purchase on my website if you aren't planning on joining the course. So all the steps that we've talked about this month, all the modules we go through in plan like a pro are referenced in a 25-page workbook that you can print out and work through to plan your garden this year.

[00:02:56] Now you won't have the benefit of the five hours of video lessons and other downloads, but it's a great way to get the information and work through the steps with more guidance than just listening to these episodes and then trying to figure it out on the fly on your own, right? And y'all, it's 10 bucks, okay?

[00:03:15] So I really did try to make an affordable option that's easy to use for anybody that just needs a little extra bit of help to grow more in their garden, be more organized, and know what to do next in the garden through the entire growing season. So it's in my shop, justgrowsomething.com slash shop. I'll link to it in the show notes and there's a link to it in today's email as well.

[00:03:39] But again, if you are in plan like a pro, a beefier version of this workbook is in there for you to download and use right away. I will also mention that if you have not taken advantage of Magic Mind's new bundle of both their mental performance and sleep performance shots, now is the time to do it with 45% off that bundle. These guys work really hard at improving their products continually.

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[00:05:26] Get your special bundle at 45% off at magicmind.com slash grow something Jan. I will link to that in the show notes. Okay, so there are six key elements that I think need to be included on your calendar or in your planner for your gardening season.

[00:05:47] The first of these is your frost dates, both your last anticipated frost in the spring and your first anticipated frost in the fall. Now, if you are a warm climate gardener and you generally don't see a frost, you might be marking when your daylight hours drop below 10 hours per day or when they get above 10 hours a day again. Or even when your soil temperatures warm up enough for planting.

[00:06:14] These dates are all going to depend on your gardening area. And understand, these dates, these frost dates, may not be the end-all be-all for your planning purposes. I plant a lot by soil temperature followed by air temperatures. But frost dates can give you an idea of when things are likely going to go in the ground based on your area's history.

[00:06:41] So you can base your planting and seed starting on these dates and adjust as you go. But this is just another reason why having a garden journal is going to help you with your future planning. Because most of us saw our USDA hardiness zones shift this last year to one zone warmer or one partial zone warmer, right? We went from 6A to 6B, which means that our frost dates may be adjusting as well.

[00:07:10] So if we can keep a lot of these notes for ourselves, this is going to help us for our planning purposes. But if you're just starting out or you've never kept a journal, then use the anticipated frost dates that you can find online and go from there. The second thing you should be noting in your calendar would be your seed starting dates and your transplant dates. So this is for across the entire season.

[00:07:35] Not just what you're starting indoors and transplanting in the spring, but also what you're direct sowing in the spring. Your succession plantings as the season moves on and all of your fall dates as well. So because we've already annotated our first frost date or our frost dates in general,

[00:07:55] we can use that last anticipated frost date in the spring as a way to count backwards to determine when we should start our seeds indoors. Now we're going to talk a lot about that over the next few weeks as we talk about seed starting. But just think about this in terms of where you're going to put these dates on the calendar.

[00:08:16] You can also use the first frost in fall to count backwards for when you want your fall crops to mature and then count back even further for your seed starting. Mark all of this down. So, for example, if you have brassicas that you intend to mature in the fall and you either need to track down plants in the late summer to transplant or you need to start your own, these dates need to go on your calendar.

[00:08:43] It's very easy to let the season get away from you in the summer when everything in the garden seems to need your attention all at the same time. And you forget that you were supposed to start those broccoli plants three weeks ago and now you're behind and they're never going to mature on time for your area. I have been there time and time again, actually. So that is why I now have a very complete calendar at the beginning of the season. So I miss nothing.

[00:09:10] Now, part of this is also calculating when you'll begin to harvest your plants. That is number three. This might not seem like it's something that you really need to have written down because you kind of think it's going to be obvious when you walk out there and go, oh, well, yeah, that needs to be harvested. But this actually serves a couple of purposes. Number one, it's going to depend on when the crop actually went in the ground.

[00:09:39] OK, so we need to be a little bit flexible when we're putting some of these dates on here. This one is always going to be a more of an approximate date rather than a hard and fast one, because it's going to depend on when you actually planted those things. Also, it may not always be obvious when something is ready to be harvested. Think about your root crops, especially things like carrots that can have these big, huge, beautiful tops on them. And you think, oh, that's got to be ready to pull.

[00:10:06] And you go and pull it and you have this teeny tiny little stick of a pencil, you know, shaped or sized carrot that comes out of the ground. Yeah. What went wrong there? Well, there could be any number of things. But if you have no idea when those were actually supposed to be ready to pull, you have no idea without going back and looking at when you planted and looking at the seed packet, whether or not you accidentally pulled that early. It very well may be possible that those carrots needed to be in the ground for at least another two weeks.

[00:10:36] And that's why they're too small. And it has nothing to do with your soil fertility or anything else. So having a date, an approximate date as to when you should expect to start to see that harvest is a good thing to have marked on your calendar. I say this is also going to be flexible, too, because this is going to depend on your weather and your insect predation. So it's something that you can use to look forward to what the next task is going to be.

[00:11:02] And it also gives you an opportunity to write some things down in your garden journal if you don't hit that date. If you plant a tomato variety and you transplant it and it's supposed to be ready 75 days from transplant and it's been three months and you have not had any tomatoes yet. Why are we looking at weather? Are we looking at insect predation? What other types of things might be causing that problem?

[00:11:26] So this is all going to help you, but it's also going to help you in planning your successions and your fall plantings. So if you have no idea when that plant is supposed to either be done producing or is supposed to slow down or is supposed to come out of the garden, then you're not going to have any idea of what needs to come next. So that is another reason why this date is very good to have marked on your calendar.

[00:11:54] And finally, it's also going to be necessary for planning whether or not you plan to preserve any part of the harvest. So if you, like me, find that it is way too hot in the middle of the summer to be standing in the kitchen and canning up jar after jar of tomatoes, you might opt for a determinate variety that comes ready pretty much all at once over about a two or three week period. And you plan that for a fall harvest.

[00:12:24] You're going to need to know when to put those plants in and when you expect that that harvest is going to come so that you are ready when it's time to start doing your massive canning marathon. Right. All kinds of different reasons why you might want to mark on your calendar when you will begin to harvest your plants. Number four would be trellising and pruning dates. Okay. So this could be for your annual plants like your tomatoes specifically,

[00:12:52] if you are somebody who does a lot of pruning or a lot of trellising. Your cucumbers, if you just like to trellis those. Or winter squashes, if you're planning on having them grow over a huge trellis, you might need to go out there. You might need a reminder that you need to go out there and sort of zhuzh them into place or get them where they're supposed to be. Or you might need a reminder weekly or every two weeks to go out and wrap those tomatoes. This is also for perennials like your fruit trees or your canes.

[00:13:20] So marking on your calendar when the best time is to prune your fruit trees or to trellis your blackberry canes. Right. It is very easy to overlook these tasks when we are busy with other tasks. And if it's something like trellising, that can get really out of control very, very quickly. And it's hard to recover from.

[00:13:47] So if you tend to get behind on tasks like this or cutting back activities for perennials as well, like asparagus in the wintertime, if you continually forget to go out and do these things, and then you're looking back on it going, darn, now I got to play catch up. So put those tasks on the calendar. You are less likely to forget it, or at least it's going to be there in the back of your mind like, oh, yep, I got to get to that. The fifth thing would be fertilizing or amending your beds.

[00:14:15] So amending in the fall or the very, very early spring is what we usually recommend, right? We don't want to be doing it right as we are putting our plants in the ground. But if this is a task that you sometimes forget to do, it's a good idea to have it on the calendar to remind you. You've got to get those amendments. You've got to get the compost or whatever else it is that you are doing. And then you need to get out there and actually do the task, right?

[00:14:44] So if it's on the calendar, you're more likely to do it, or at least you're more likely to remember to do it. Fertilizing is another one, especially if you have specific crops that need to be fertilized on a schedule. So think things like onions, right? I typically am going out there and fertilizing my onions on a very specific schedule. It might be every two weeks. It might be three weeks. It might be four weeks, depending on when they went in the ground and all kinds of other factors.

[00:15:10] But if it's not on the calendar, number one, I don't know if I actually did it the last time like I was supposed to, right? So I should be writing that down also. And then, all right, am I doing it at the proper interval? If you also have historically depleted nutrients in some of your beds. So if you live in an area where your native soil is typically always deficient in phosphorus,

[00:15:34] then you might want to mark on your calendar at specific times of the year when you need to amend for your phosphorus. These are things that we don't want to forget about. And number six is pest and disease management tasks, right? This is especially important if we have pests that we deal with every single year around the same time. So I will use the squash vine borer as an example.

[00:16:01] If you know the beginning of the season you have pressure from the squash vine borer and you typically lose your plants to this, it would be a good idea to put on the calendar when you are supposed to put out, say, the sticky traps or the pheromone traps that you plan to use, like I do this year, to help keep that pest at bay.

[00:16:23] If you have perennial plants like fruit trees that are susceptible to certain pests and you need to spray dormant oil on those trees, well, that needs to be done when the trees are, wait for it, dormant, right? Dormant oil. But it's very easy to forget about that. And all of a sudden it's spring and the sun is out and you're looking at your trees and now they're starting to break bud. And it's too late to add that dormant oil.

[00:16:53] So these are things that you want to put on the calendar, right? Okay. So that sounds like a lot of stuff to include, right? How do we organize all of this information and get it onto a calendar or a planner so that we don't miss anything? First things first, decide what type of calendar you want to use. I am doing this twofold this year.

[00:17:17] First, I'm using the Grow and Flourish Planner from the Girly Homesteader to lay out these tasks that are specific to each of my crops throughout the garden. And we'll talk about that here in a minute. Then I'm using my sugar paper day planner that I use to organize my entire work and personal life.

[00:17:38] To move those tasks to a monthly calendar and then move that to my weekly calendar on a weekly basis. I will leave links to both of those planners in the show notes. This is just a system that works well for me because I can use one entire planner for nothing but garden notes and seed inventories and all of my farm and homestead related tasks. But I run two companies. I'm a mentor.

[00:18:06] I have multiple speaking engagements coming up. I have six other irons in the fire and I need one planner to track them all. That sounds like a Lord of the Rings reference. Anyway, to also include anything that I might do in my personal life. So I move tasks monthly to my master planner and then those tasks get added to my weekly planner and then those are added to my daily schedule. People ask how I get all this stuff done. It's this.

[00:18:36] It's magic mind and it's this planner system. Okay. It works for me. But you need to find your own way to add your garden tasks to your everyday life. If this means you track them in your day planner or in a digital calendar or a wall calendar in your kitchen. Whichever works for you. That's the first thing, right? Decide on your calendar.

[00:18:59] Now, let's go through the seven steps that will help you define what gets added and when so that you can have your entire gardening year planned out so you do not miss a beat through the whole season. So step one is to determine those key dates. You want your last frost date. So, for instance, my last frost date, we're here in zone 6B, has typically been around April 15th.

[00:19:25] I believe now it has shifted officially to April 20th. You might need to adjust this slightly based on your local microclimate. Again, this is where a garden journal really, really comes in handy if you can track these things. But this is just going to be and always will be just an estimate because obviously the weather is different every single year, right? But you also want to put your first frost date in the fall.

[00:19:51] Again, in my area, this typically falls between October 15th and October 30th. We use this date to plan our fall gardening tasks and maybe what we plan to do into the winter. If you are a warm climate gardener, these dates may not pertain to you. You might be listing dates that pertain to your soil temperatures or your air temperatures.

[00:20:13] What will pertain to you and does pertain to most everybody are other dates that you might need to note in your calendar that are going to affect what you can do in your garden. Things like vacations or other events where you're leaving town and you're not going to be there to tend your garden. If you are planning an extended vacation in the middle of the summer, say it's two weeks, you have some decisions to make based around that date.

[00:20:41] You can absolutely plan for it. Either you can plan for there to be a gap in your crops or in your harvest so that you don't have to worry about it while you're gone. Or it's something that just needs to be maintained minimally where you can just set a timer for maybe your irrigation system and call it good. Or you know that you need to bring in some help.

[00:21:07] Somebody who can cover your garden tasks for you, you know, with maintenance and harvest and that sort of thing. But it might sneak up on you if you don't have it marked on your calendar. If it's there from the beginning, you can plan the garden around it. So any other key dates that you think are going to interrupt or impact your gardening activities can be placed on the calendar. This also means that you can time some of your harvests on some of your crops.

[00:21:34] So if you plan on growing one batch of sweet corn during the season, the planting dates on sweet corn in most areas are fairly flexible. So if you know you're going to be gone in the middle of July for two weeks, then you might not want to plant your sweet corn until after you get back. Or you want to plant one that is a very, very early maturing variety so it's not coming ready during that two-week period while you're gone. Okay? Does that make sense to you? So determine your key dates. That is step number one.

[00:22:03] Step number two is to list the crops that you plan to grow. So a list of all of your annual vegetables, your fruits, your herbs, and then also include any perennials that are already established in your garden. Okay? So for me, we'd look at, you know, tomatoes and peppers, beans, zucchini, lettuce, basil, you know. And then if I had any perennials out there, you want to list your asparagus, your rhubarb, your strawberries, all your cane berries. Anything that you are growing needs to go into a list.

[00:22:33] And the next thing, step number three, is to organize tasks by those crops. So for each one of your crops that you have listed, you need to write out the tasks. When to start those seeds indoors if you need to. When to transplant them outside. When they should be direct sown outdoors. Use your last frost date or the end of your Persephone period, whatever your, you know, your guide is as your guide. Right?

[00:23:02] So for seed starting indoors, if you have cool weather crops, you're going to want to get those started six to eight weeks before your last frost. For me, for like broccoli and cauliflower and those types of things, that's going to be early March. For your warm season crops, okay, you want those to be getting started at the appropriate time. For tomatoes, that's generally about six weeks before your last frost. So that might be mid-March, right?

[00:23:31] But if it's something like peppers, hot peppers, that I know take two, sometimes three weeks to even germinate, and they grow very slowly, I might need to start those eight weeks before my last frost. We want to look at those transplanting dates. Your cool weather crops, you're likely transplanting those about two to four weeks before your last frost. So your spinach is going in. Peas are being direct sown. This for us is probably early April, maybe the very end of March.

[00:23:58] And then your warm season crops, generally one to two weeks after your last frost. Now, this is the one that I fudge a little bit, and actually all of them I really do, because I base a lot of this on the soil temperatures. So these dates, as they are, are going to go on my calendar. But then I'm doubling down. So if that date is approaching, say for my tomatoes, and I am infamous for waiting to plant my tomatoes until later than some others,

[00:24:28] but they always end up producing right around the same time as everybody else's. Because I wait to plant those tomatoes until the soil temperature reaches a certain point, and I know it is warm enough for them. So I'm going to have my transplant date for my tomatoes on the calendar, but then I'm going to go out and I'm going to test the soil. And then I'm going to make an adjustment if I need to, okay? So none of these dates are ever going to be set in stone. You're going to be flexible. And then you also want to put your direct seeding dates on there, too.

[00:24:55] So for your cool weather crops, as soon as the soil is workable, your warm weather crops, again, after that soil warms up, these dates all need to go on the calendar, okay? And then, of course, one of the other tasks that is associated with each one of these crops are your expected harvest dates and then any additional care tasks. So if you're doing trellising, fertilizing, pruning, all of these things should be listed by crop. It might be easier to do this in a spreadsheet if you have a lot of different crops that you're dealing with.

[00:25:23] If you're only planting three or four things, those are the main staples of your garden. This is easy to kind of jot down. Write what it is. Write what you have to do for it. Because we're going to put all those things onto the calendar, okay? Step four is to plan your succession planting. So we talked about this in a previous episode. We're talking about, you know, succession plantings for continuous harvest.

[00:25:47] We're also talking about sort of split successions, some that are planted in the spring, some that are planted in the fall, and how to determine those. This is when you want to put that on your calendar. So if you plan to sow seeds for your lettuces and your radishes every two to three weeks until late spring, write it on the calendar. That way, A, you know when you did it because you can adjust that for the actual date that you actually put them in the ground, right?

[00:26:16] So if you have it marked for, you know, April 1st and they don't go in until April 5th, well, you can adjust that next date if you need to. Or not. It depends on how stringent you are. That's fine. It's up to you. It's your calendar, right? But then if you know that you're going to resume planting those things in the late summer for fall crops, you also need to put that on the calendar so that you don't forget about it when the time comes.

[00:26:39] Step five would be any maintenance tasks that you feel like you continually forget, okay? So we already talked about sort of the trellising and the staking and the fertilizing. These are all things that would go into your crop list and things that you know would have to happen specifically. So if you've got really fast-growing crops like tomatoes and cucumbers that need support, you might want a little reminder in there of when you should start trellising them, when you should start staking them.

[00:27:08] If you prune your tomatoes, when you should start pruning. Fertilizing, again, you know, we do want to add compost well before planting to make sure that it's active and ready for our plants. So you might want to put this on your schedule in the fall before your growing season or even the middle of winter. If you've forgotten this task, you can often find yourself in a rush in the spring trying to track down the really good compost at the same time everybody else is.

[00:27:37] And so you might find yourself lacking. So the earlier you have this on your calendar, the better, and it's going to remind you to get that done. You also are probably going to want to schedule any side dressing that you're going to do at any of those key growth stages. So after your tomatoes are, you know, set on their first fruits or mid-season for your squashes or whatever, it's easy to forget if it's not scheduled, right? But there are also some tasks that you might think are intuitive and you're going to notice that they need to be done.

[00:28:05] But sometimes by the time you notice they need to be done, it's a much bigger job than if you had tackled it before. I mean, things like weeding and mulching. If it's something that you struggle with, don't beat yourself up and say, well, I should have known that I needed to get out there and do that. You know, or kick yourself because you just weren't paying attention because, I don't know, you had six soccer games for your kids last weekend or whatever it is,

[00:28:31] and you didn't get out there to check the garden to see if you needed to add mulch or if the weeds were getting out of control. So schedule it. Put it on your calendar for every, you know, one to two weeks or whatever it is. Just like you schedule everything else in your life if you're trying to manage multiple tasks. You heard my scheduling system, right? It can be crazy. But it makes sure that I get things done. There is no shame in my game. I will write down every single thing that needs to get done. Sometimes it's just nice to be able to check something off a list too, right?

[00:28:59] But if you schedule it, it is more likely to get done. You are less likely to overlook it. And then finally, number six or step six is going to be include your fall gardening tasks. Now, we already kind of talked about this in terms of each crop individually, but I want to emphasize this because it is very easy to forget about things that need to happen for a fall garden while we are in the busyness of the mid-summer garden.

[00:29:25] So this is going to be things like calculating your seed starting based on your first frost date in the fall. So, you know, your broccoli, your kale, other cool weather crops that you might need to start indoors in late June to transplant out in late July or early August. Mark those dates on the calendar. Mark dates also that you might need in terms of direct sowing.

[00:29:48] So carrots or radishes or beets that you might have to go in the ground in early to mid-August in order for them to mature on time. You also should include things like perennial maintenance. So do you need to prune and clean up your strawberries? Or do you need to trim back the cane berries in, you know, the late fall or early winter? Do you need to remember to mulch your asparagus or your rhubarb once they have gone dormant?

[00:30:13] Things that you might typically forget about need to be added to this for your fall gardening tasks. And another thing that I can't emphasize enough is your soil prep for the next season. So adding compost or other organic matter to your beds in the late October to prepare for the next season. Obviously, if you don't plan a fall garden, there are some tasks that are going to be skipped here.

[00:30:35] But if you often feel worn out at the end of the summer gardening season and tend to just drop everything and walk away and not look back until spring, but then you feel like you're running to play catch up with bed prep and amending and tool maintenance and everything else, maybe putting some of those tasks on the calendar in the fall will give you a little gentle nudge to say, hey, don't walk away yet. Your future garden self will thank you for it in the spring.

[00:31:08] Now, finally, step number seven is to review and adjust. And this is not something that you do at the end. You want to regularly review your calendar to adjust for unexpected changes like weather delays or pest outbreaks that either cause you to plant late or that cause your harvest to come in late. Everything on the calendar should be in pencil or keep it digitally so that it can be adjusted.

[00:31:35] We are dealing with mother nature here and living organisms. Nothing is going to be set in stone. As you move through the first season of using a calendar, you can make notes of the things you maybe forgot to do that you might want to include on next year's calendar. And some of these things you might feel like you don't need a reminder for. Just like everything else in the garden.

[00:32:01] This is all tailored to you, your garden, your gardening style and just how you operate. I do much better if I have a daily task list and I pull that task list from a weekly list that came from a monthly list that is based on a calendar. This is in both my business world as well as my gardening one. You might operate differently and that's okay. Just find a system that works for you to keep you on track for the season.

[00:32:28] So it's one less stress point in growing your best garden while still enjoying the whole experience. If you feel like you need a little bit more help in this area, don't forget that my garden planning workbook is for sale in the shop on my website. And you get that workbook included if you join Plan Like a Pro, which has just a few days remaining on registration if you want the bonuses included.

[00:32:54] All of the links to everything I talked about today will be in the show notes, including the link to the special January bundle from Magic Mind for both their mental performance and sleep performance shots. Thank you so much for being here. As always, any questions, reach out however you can. DM me, email me, whatever it is. I am always, always, always happy to help. Until next time, my gardening friends, keep on cultivating that dream garden and we'll talk again soon.