Garden Sowing Plan
As I mentioned before having a good plan is crucial to having an efficient and productive garden. That not only applies to planning where and how to set-up your garden, it’s absolutely also about how and when to sow which vegetables into your garden.
And that is what this article is all about: How and When to Sow Which Vegetables.
With Easy Urban Gardening, we live by the rule of never having empty squares in our gardens and harvesting young.
Let me dive a bit deeper into those two principles.
Never have an empty square in your garden; what does that mean. It simply means you will always sow a new vegetable immediately after you harvested the previous one. So if you sow radishes in spring they are ready to harvest in 4-6 weeks. Maybe you won’t harvest then all at the same time, so in our planning we give them 7 weeks and then you should have eaten them all. Which means the square is empty and you sow a new vegetables, let’s say lettuce heads. It takes about 8 weeks for a lettuce head to be ready to harvest. As we have 4 heads in a square we calculate that we harvest them in two rounds, so 9 weeks after you sowed the lettuce you are ready for the next round of sowing.
Get the principle? Well combine that with the rule of harvesting young, you can now probably imagine how an Easy Urban Garden can be so incredibly productive when it comes to yields. Besides that young vegetables taste way better than older ones, so we aren’t punishing ourselves by harvesting young.
So a sowing plan is a crucial element of an Easy Urban Garden, but honestly of every garden you want to be efficient and productive. But I also know from my students that it can be one of the more complicated things to do, if you just start gardening.
How to make a garden plan
Let me explain in a little bit more detail.
Easy Urban Gardeners work in 30x30cm (1sq. foot) patches in their garden and every square is planned. So for my example, imagine you have a 60x60 cm Easy Urban Garden which of course includes 4 squares.
To plan your garden you have to make a little table on paper with on the top horizontal row the months of the season March-October. Vertically you have 4 column underneath every month representing the weeks. On the left hand side of the table you number the horizontal lines 1-4 representing your squares.
Starting with square 1 we first sow radishes starting right now which is halfway March. Radishes take 4-5 weeks to ripen, so you can assume your square is harvested empty in max 7 weeks. To visualise this you colour in 7 weeks and name them radish. As of week 8 you can now sow something new.
A quick glance to the top of the table tells us that this is half May. Corresponding to season you can now sow for instance French beans. They will give you the first pods after about 5-7 weeks, but of course you can harvest the beans over a longer period of time, so you colour in 10 weeks for your beans.
Again looking at the months at the top of the tables, by the time your harvested all your beans it is beginning of August. That’s a good time to sow endive, which will be in your garden for 12 weeks before you can start harvesting and will therefor stay in your garden until the end of the season.
You now made a sowing plan for the season for square 1. And of course you repeat this exercise for all the squares you have, sowing as many different vegetables.
Let’s have a quick look into the opportunities (starting half March) you have for the other square to show you how divers and varied your little garden can be and how much you can get out of it
Square 2: 9 weeks lamb’s lettuce until end of May, then 12 weeks for beetroots until end of August and 12 weeks Kohlrabi until the end of season.
Square 3: 8 weeks of spinach until half May, 1 tomato plant until end of September and 1 Tuscan kale proving you with fresh greens over winter until spring next year.
Square 4: 6 weeks for the pak choi until end of April, 8 weeks for lettuce until end of June, 12 weeks for carrots until end of September and then spinach for the rest of the season.
You see how amazingly productive your little garden can be, if you make a proper planning? You can harvest the following out of these 4 squares: 16 radishes, 1,5 - 2 kg beans, 4 heads of endive, 500 gr. lamb’s lettuce, 9 beetroots, 4 Kohlrabi, 2 kg spinach, 18 tomatoes, 3 kg kale, 4 heads pak choi, 4 shocks lettuce, 16 carrots
Yes all of this out of just 60x60 cm or 2x2 square foot.
To have a more visual idea of how a planning can look like, I added a picture of a planning for my 120x60cm or 4x2 square foot garden.
And if you want to learn more, join my Easy Urban Gardening Facebook Group.
Green regards,
🌱 Émely