6 Steps to Make Vegetable Garden Planning Simple And Easy

Want to make vegetable garden planning simple and easy? Let’s decide what vegetables you will grow, where they will be planted and when you need to do seeding & transplanting.

If you want to have a successful vegetable garden, you will need to do some advance planning. While you could just randomly plant seeds in any old spot in the garden, you may run into problems.

Do your vegetable garden planning ahead of time and you will save your money on buying seeds, as you will only buy what you need. And you will avoid issues with planting the wrong plants together or planting the same plants in the same spot year after year.

Whether you are starting a vegetable garden from scratch as a beginner or have been growing for a while and want better yields, here are the steps I recommend to plan your vegetable garden.

This process doesn’t take much time, doesn’t require you to purchase any special tools, is relatively easy and produces a usable plan that you can adapt from year to year.

Grab yourself a hot drink and settle in with your seed catalogues for the next few steps!

1. Decide What Vegetables to Grow

Before you can plan out where to plant vegetables, you will need to decide what to plant. There are a few criteria to consider including:

• what grows best in your climate
• what you and your family likes to eat
• what produces the most vegetables for the least space if you are space-constrained and/or have a large family
• a mix of vegetables that will complement each other, both as companion plants but also for succession planting and crop rotation

How do you find out what vegetables will grow in your climate? Best is to get a seed catalogue from a local seed company. Why local? They will have seeds that have been proven to grow well and resist common diseases. If you get seeds from a seed company halfway across the country or from overseas, you will need to figure out if the seeds will work in your area and if you can even get the seeds as not all seeds can be shipped internationally.

In my case here on the west coast of Canada, we have West Coast Seeds. They have a comprehensive seed catalogue of seeds of plants that grow well in the Lower Mainland of BC and Vancouver Island, where my hometown of Victoria is located.

But if buying online is easier in your busy life, I’m also an affiliate for Seeds Now. They have a great selection of seeds, quick shipping and often have sales which makes it cost-effective, especially if you want to try a variety of seeds.

Save 10% now if you use my link below.

However if you still need more help deciding what to grow, check out this excellent roundup that I’m featured in: The Best Vegetables To Grow Shared By 60 Gardening Bloggers

I use the regional planting charts in the catalogue and highlight the vegetables we will grow in the coming year. There are growing lists for vegetables, herbs and flowers, so I go through all the lists at one time.

Once I have the desired vegetables highlighted, I check my seed box that I keep in the fridge. I put a $ next to the vegetables I need to buy seeds for and a checkmark next to the ones I still have enough of. I keep in mind succession sowing so even if I still have some seeds, I may buy more to have enough to plant all season long. I’ve learned the hard way that sometimes later in the season it is hard to get certain seeds.

Here is the page from my seed catalogue showing what I’m growing and what I need to buy:

I then make a shopping list of the seeds I need. And that’s the really fun part!

2. Decide What Varieties of Veggies To Grow

This part I love doing. You can spend hours browsing through your seed catalogues looking at all the varieties of vegetable seeds and having big dreams of what you will grow!

Using the list of seeds you made, start looking at the matching sections of the catalogue. There are a few criteria that you need to keep in mind when picking seed varieties. Here are just a few common ones:

• days to maturity – this tells you how long you need to wait to be able to harvest the first vegetables, if you have a short growing season pick the variety that has the shortest days to maturity
• seedless vs. seeded – you can get seedless cucumbers, tomatoes and watermelons – in my case important, as my wife can’t digest seeds well and has to remove them prior to eating them
• disease resistant – some varieties are resistant to the common diseases that affect that particular vegetable
• good for greenhouse growing – these usually are heat-tolerant and do not have male and female flowers, meaning that pollination is more reliable
• size of plants – you may want dwarf or bush varieties if you have limited space
• size of vegetables – size can affect taste and what you can do with the vegetable, think stuffer tomatoes or peppers – these usually are larger sizes
• flavour – you may prefer a particular sweetness (think corn) or in the case of hot peppers a certain heat level of spiciness
• colour – you may prefer a certain colour, I usually choose a multi-colour blend if available as it provides some variety to a vegetable dish and eating a rainbow of colours is healthier. Plus it looks great in the garden as I describe in this article: How To Have An Attractive Food Garden
• GMO vs. non-GMO (West Coast Seeds for instance does not sell any GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) seeds) – this is a hotly debated topic: are GMO seeds and thus the plants that grow from them are less healthy and could cause health issues when consumed? I don’t want to take any risks so I try and buy only non-GMO seeds
• Organic vs. non-organic seeds (ie. organic seeds are saved from organically grown vegetables) – again a debated topic and I try to buy organic seeds when available, although they tend to be more expensive
• Open Pollinated vs. Hybrid – hybrid seeds results from cross-pollination of two different varieties of the same vegetable. While there are advantages (higher yield, shorter growing season, cold-hardiness, disease resistance), saving seeds from a hybrid plant will not guarantee you will get the same vegetable again as seeds likely will revert to one of it’s parents genetics
• Cost – some varieties are very expensive and only certain varieties are available in larger quantities if you plan to plant a lot of seeds

Sometimes the choice is difficult. Or do what a real gardener does and buy more than one variety and hope you will find the room to grow them all!

Once you have chosen a variety, write it down on your shopping list. I usually write down my first pick and then one or more second picks as sometimes seeds are not available at the nursery where I buy them from. Alternatively you can also do mail-order and there is a better chance of getting the varieties that you want, so long as you order early enough.

Here is the list I came up with (with some help from my 4-year old daughter):

One other note on this: you may not need to do much in this step if you save your seeds from year to year. However if you want to try a new variety, you may have to buy a seed packet here and there to get the starter plants.

And you may also want to buy some seedlings in spring or late summer (for fall crops) instead of seeding your own. You may want to read my guide on whether or not you should buy seeds or seedlings.

3. Determine What Space You Have For Your Veggie Garden

Before you can start planning you will need to evaluate the space you have available if you have never grown vegetables before. Perhaps you only have space for one 4 foot x 8 foot raised bed. Or perhaps even just a few containers.

If you’re unsure of the space you have, check out Vegetable Garden Site Preparation: How To Find And Prepare The Best Spot For Your Veggie Garden That will give you valuable tips on where you can start your first vegetable garden.

I now use a spreadsheet to map out my vegetable beds. I simply set the row and column height to be the same to get square cells and then set the fill on them to a brown to indicate the bed sizes.

You can also just use a piece of graph paper and do this completely by hand. Just count out two squares per square foot and outline each bed in a pen (don’t use a pencil as you may do some erasing later on when you pencil in the crops you will grow).

For containers you can just draw some circles or other shapes roughly representing the containers.

Here is what I get after doing this step. Note that the middle bed is actually a bit longer (cropped out of the picture) and the small bed on the right is my daughter’s 2×3 foot planter (yes, it is 2×4 foot on the plan (mistake!) and I changed it later)

By the way, if your kids want their own be sure to check out my companion article Planning A Vegetable Garden For Kids: Make It Fun And Easy – a great way for kids to start growing their own food!

You can of course save the spreadsheet as a template or duplicate it to use it for following years. Or if doing this on paper, make photocopies of the space availability plan before you start filling in crops.

4. Vegetable Garden Planning For Crop Rotation

If you have not gardened before, you can skip this step. If you did grow some vegetables last year, this step is important for you.

Crop rotation is key to minimize pest infestations, crop damage from diseases and to build healthy soil. I’ve covered why you need to plan for crop rotation in a separate post: Vegetable Crop Rotation: How To Increase Your Harvests

5. Write in your Veggie Crops on Your Plan

Now finally you get to plan out your crops. Using your list of vegetables you will grow this year, start deciding where they will go and write in your crops.

Obviously follow your crop rotation plan from the previous step but also look at where you need to put up trellises for climbing plants such as peas and pole or runner beans. Tall plants such as corn also need to be strategically located. You don’t want tall trellises and plants to cast a shadow on smaller plants all day. Usually this means putting the tall plants and trellises on the north side of the beds if you run your rows west to east. Or run your rows north to south and it won’t matter as much.

Checking your seed catalogue again, see what the recommendation is for plant spacing of each vegetable. This will determine how many plants you can put in a square foot or in a row and how far apart those rows need to be. In my case I don’t worry too much about noting down the spacing within rows. I now tend to do it by eye and I do plant more densely than the seed catalogues suggest.

Keep in mind that there are plants that do well together and plants that don’t do well together. This is called companion planting and West Coast Seeds has a great guide on this topic that you can use. This will impact where you put plants.

Here is my plan completed for 2018. In case you are wondering I will plant peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumber, melon and zucchini in containers either in the greenhouse or elsewhere in the garden, not in the raised beds.

6. Write Down Important Planting Dates

You are almost done! The final step is to again look at your seed catalogue and start writing in dates on a calendar (a free or cheap physical calendar or one on your computer or phone).

If you are planning on succession planting, you should follow the recommendation in the seed catalogue and repeat a note to plant more seeds in the appropriate interval.

Here is what I have done for March:

You can also note down the first possible harvest date based on the days to maturity. This can be hit or miss and you should be checking your vegetables for ripening regularly anyways. It is highly dependent on weather and how much feeding and water you are giving them.

And you can also use the physical calendar for other tasks in the garden – I use Apple’s Calendar online instead for that and my other tasks, so you could do that too.

Now after following these six steps you should have a vegetable garden plan that will improve your gardening results for the coming year.

As with all plans you need to be prepared to modify the plan as you need to. Make notes of what you change and why so that you can use that info next year so that your vegetable gardening planning evolves as you gain more experience.

For help with your vegetable garden planning sign up for a garden coaching session and I’ll help you plan the right vegetable garden for your space and your needs.

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