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Garden plot planning?
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 CLICK DAILY TO FEED THE HUNGRY United States: http://www.stopthehunger.com/ International: http://www.thehungersite.com/ |
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