Here's a good planting and yield chart.
http://www.territorial-seed.com/link...ing_chart.html
That's also a good seed company.
I'm thinking the best thing is for you to figure how much end-result produce
you want ... how many pounds of tomatoes and potatoes, ears of corn, and all
of that ... then use the chart above to back into the number of row-feet you
need. Then just get a piece of paper and make tic marks on the sides and lay
out, without much detail, what size rectangle that amounts to. Not
considering, at this point, what goes next to what. Most things are happy
next to anything, except tomatoes and potatoes (they tend to develop plants
with BOTH tomatoes and potatoes, both of which are substandard), and corn
varieties need to be separated somewhat, especially sweet corn and popcorn,
or yellow and white sweet corn.
You want to consider how much you can use at it comes on hand, and how much
canning yield you want over and above that. 120 quarts of beans is all we
can use in one year (and about all we have the stick-to-it-ness to can) and
that's not all that many row-feet of beans. For some things, like beans,
you plant some every couple of weeks, and you will (depending on the
weather) have a new crop to harvest every couple of weeks.
An acre of garden is a LOT. Too much to till the first time with a tiller
(especially if it's sod right now), you'll need to get someone with a
tractor to get it plowed and harrowed. That will give it a nice deep
tillage anyway, so it's a good idea. To cultivate, you're going to have to
think of a tiller in the TroyBilt Horse category ... quite a machine.
You'll need room to turn around at the end of the rows. It's going to
require a lot of fertilizer, and lots of expense for seeds and plant
material. It will entail an intense session with the hoe about every day.
Or a major purchase of Preen. Or both.
We had an acre garden when I was growing up and we fed three large farm
families plus sold many many bushels of beans to the grocery stores. And
about 4 of us worked in it every day.
Once you get the basic drawing done, you can combine some things. For
instance, the spring lettuce area can become the pole bean area, the corn
can have vine crops intermingled with it.
Since this is your first year, I wouldn't want you to become overwhelmed
with the amount of weeding, and the sudden onslaught of truckloads of
produce the 2nd week in August. I'd suggest you use the row-foot table
above, and figure what you can really use, and start with a plot about that
size. Plant what you will use, and plant a small enough plot that you can
manage it with the tools you have available. Once you've seen how that
goes, you can expand somewhat
For my family of 5, with a TroyBilt Pony (little brother of the Horse), we
can go up to about 30 x 60 feet without feeling overtaxed, and have time
left over to do normal summer stuff. From that we have ample preserved
strawberries, beans and tomato products all winter, and we eat good during
the summer.
Since you'll have room to do this, let me recommend thinking about
completely alternating garden sites between two equal-sized areas each year,
letting the unused garden bed lie fallow beneath a cover crop (rye etc) each
year.
"Pat Meadows" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 19:06:00 -0800, "DH"
wrote:
I love just about every veggie (except radishes), so I want to plant
quite a
variety, but I've never been good at placement and figuring out what to
plant early enough so that I can plant a second crop later after the
early
crop expires.
Me too. I don't have much of a problem in this area now,
because I have a smallish area in which to garden, so the
choices are rather limited and it's easy to figure what goes
where - the tomatoes can only move from one end of the
garden to the other and the smaller stuff gets placed
accordingly.
I grow a lot of the smaller stuff in large containers now
too, this makes planning easier.
But in the past, with larger areas to garden, I've found
this difficult.
I know that some people use graph paper and a pencil. This
might be the best way to go, I don't know.
I have a lot of good gardening books, but nothing that really covers
planning out the layout well, except for a little book I have about
postage-stamp gardens
Have you ever read Mel Bartholomew's 'Square Foot
Gardening'? This might be helpful in this respect, it
certainly has the info on seed placement (how far away from
each other).
There's a website too: http://www.squarefootgardening.com
As to software, I've just purchased some garden
record-keeping software and discussed it here, you could
Google for the discussion on 'Garden record keeping
software'.
HOWEVER, this software doesn't plot out where you physically
put things. So I don't know if it would be all that useful
for you.
If I were looking for such software, I'd go to the freeware
and shareware sites and put 'garden' or 'gardening' in their
search box.
Two such sites a
http://www.tucows.com
http://www.freeware.com
There are other sites as well that can probably be found by
Googling on 'freeware' and 'shareware'.
I've also seen 'landscaping' software at stores such as
Staples and Office Max - they seem to be much more oriented
towards flower gardening. I don't know if any of them would
be useful for a vegetable gardener or not.
Pat
--
Pat Meadows
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