Triple your garden’s yield

With a good plan

To get the most out of your garden it is important to keep it as full as possible, to keep it as varied as possible and to keep as much fun as possible.

Three boxes easy to tick with my 3 steps to a good garden plan. But let me first explain why these three things are so important to get the most out of your garden.

It’s clear that a full garden is a garden that produces a lot of vegetables. But for me a full garden is a garden that produces vegetables at least three seasons. at it’s maximum capacity.

It surprises me over and over again how many gardeners sow or plant in spring and harvest just that, leaving the emptied garden patches …. exactly … empty.

A good garden plan can prevent this and help you keep your garden. filled from the beginning till the very end of the season.

Keep your garden as varied as possible

This is important for multiple reasons. First because it supports the health of your soil. The more different vegetables you grow, the less you exhaust your soil.

Second biodiversity in your vegetables increases biodiversity of animals in your garden and that again helps prevent pests getting out of control. So try to plant as many vegetables of as many different families in your garden.

Keep your garden as much fun as possible

Of course both above steps increase the fun in your garden. I mean who doesn’t like big yields and as many different veggies as possible.

But it is also important to organise your garden in a way that it’s fun maintaining. In a way that minimises the hard work and especially the weeding. With my Easy Urban Gardening system you do exactly that. By dividing your garden in small squares you maximise the yield while minimising the work

And in the end having a garden you really enjoy makes it more likely that you succeed and continue gardening.

Okay let’s make your garden plan in three easy steps

Step 1: you have to decide what vegetables you like to eat and how much of them. There is no purpose in growing vegetables you don’t like to eat, nor growing so much lettuce or zucchini or anything else that you don’t want to eat it anymore.

Step 2: you need a sowing calendar. Preferably one that also helps you with keeping your garden as varied as possible by showing the different plant families your vegetables belong to. You find a basic calendar like this in my special garden plan workbook which you can download for free.

Step 3: you first divide your garden in areas (ideally 30x30 cm / 1sq. foot squares) and number them. Now number the horizontal rows on your sowing plan (which is also in the planning workbook) accordingly. Check the months in which you can sow your favourite vegetables and how long it takes from sowing to harvesting. Most seed packages give you this information.

And it’s time to colour in the little squares on your planner with every square one week.

For example carrots belong to the root family, which is orange, can be sown from March to August and take 10 weeks to grow. This means you pick a garden square (which is a horizontal row) where you want to grow carrots and go to the week of the year in which you want to sow them. Let’s say it is half March and you want to grow carrots in your square numbered 4. You go to line 4 and look for the thirds sqaure in the March column. Colour that sqaure plus the next 9 orange and you have your sqaure occupied for the ten weeks it takes your carrots to fully mature.

But after 10 weeks it is only end of May, so still at least 4 more months of gardening to go. Now you go back to your calendar in combination with your favourite vegetables list and look for something that can. be sown in June, like beans for example. Beans would take about 9 weeks to grow and belong to the blue family, so you could colour in another 10 weeks from early June until half August for your next vegetable. And then half August you can still sow Swiss Chard, which makes the next 7 weeks in your planner green.

See how that increases the amoount of yield from your garden? You just realised harvesting three different vegetables and that’s just from 1 tiny square in your garden! You now still have to fill all the others.

This is how I maximise my yields to an amazing amount of vegetables from the tiny little gardens I have on my terrace in town.

Now it’s up to you to maximise your garden’s potential. Download my planning workbook and get your plan ready no matter what month it is, you can always start Easy Urban Gardening. Remember I started my first Easy Urban Garden in September.