Our Garden Plan

I started plotting out the garden beds with pen and paper, then tried a spreadsheet and while each worked just fine, I was thrilled to come upon this garden planning software.  It is super easy to learn, filled with helpful information, and customizable to your particular climate.  It even has good information about companion planting and crop rotation.  I measured out our front and back yards, plugged the data into the software and went to town.  Looking at our yard in this way actually helped us to identify more areas we could use for our edible garden.

This is the plan for our front yard:

This is the back yard:

The program also provides really helpful information about when to start indoors/outdoors and has room for personal notes.

 

I know the text of these images is likely to small to read, but hopefully you get the idea. We are growing the basics, tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, and trying a few more uncommon items like rutabaga and kohlrabi.

We measure our growing area in feet rather than acres, and have been inspired by the idea of square foot gardening.  I don't think we fall under the umbrella of a true square foot gardener, but we are growing most of our plants more tightly spaced than traditional recommendations.  We will know is several months how this pans out!