In 2023, with the help of incredible neighbors, we turned over a portion of our front pasture into a 5,000-square-foot garden space. My husband will tell you I have 0 understanding of how space works. I have a really hard time knowing how big something is and how it will fit into a space. So when my neighbor came over and asked where I wanted him to plow with his tractor we walked a line and I said “From here to here”. You would think that would be enough for me to see how big the space was going to be. It didn’t click until the ground was turned over and fully tilled for me to really grasp how much space it actually was. So I was instantly overwhelmed, had a mini panic attack, and just started planting things that needed to get into the ground without any rhyme or reason. So unfortunately that turned into a really underutilized space with lots of weeds and holes with no plants.
There are a couple of reasons to start planning your garden. The first is November is when most seed companies release their catalog for the next year. In my experience, seeds sell out fast. If you want specific varieties, you want to get them before they sell out. Potatoes and garlic are two I have missed out on due to not ordering early enough. So in order to know what to order I needed to know a layout of what would fit where.
The other reason is Cover Crop planting. With my heavy clay soil, In order to plant root veggies efficiently, I need to plant tillage radishes where I will plant them next year. So planning out my garden early was really important.
So for 2024, I decided to get really serious and figure out a detailed plan, completely overhauling my garden space. Which is where the Farmers Almanac Garden Planner came into play. I’ve seen several different programs for garden planning, some free, some very expensive, and some are invite-only, but for me, this garden planner seemed easy to use with some handy features that would make it easier than a hand-drawn plan. They do a 7-day free trial so you can check it out and see if it will work for you. What is really awesome about this program is that it has all the plants preloaded with spacing requirements. It also has this awesome feature to add to a plan for the next year to help with crop rotation. You can also add in your irrigation and structures. It makes a list when you are finished of exactly how many plants you need of each variety, and the exact numbers of irrigation stuff you need. You can set up your plants to be in the ground for specific dates, making succession planting a breeze.
Not growing market rows in the ground? No problem…The program works for raised bed gardening too. It has preloaded raised beds you can customize to your size and material.
The first thing I did was completely redesign my beds. We are on a hill so every time it rains, which is a lot in northeast Ohio, the northeast corner would have standing water, which drowned a bunch of my sweet peppers this year. So to fix that I changed my beds from 100ft North-South beds to 50ft East-West beds. With 2 ft wide walkways that will be lower than the beds to help water run down the hill. This will give me 22 total 30” wide beds to work with.
So here is my final plan for 2024. I will probably change out where plants are a few more times but this is what I’ll be prepping this fall to plant cover crops and overwinter vegetables in. I have 3 different layouts for the year. The first is my spring-planted crops. The second will be for fall planting and the third is cover crops. For my cover crops, I will be planting tillage radish which I plan to rotate potatoes to in 2025. The rest will be a cover crop mix. To know what exact varieties I am planting check out my 2024 seed picks here. If you are curious how I decided what to plant where, check out my post on companion planting and plant spacing here.
