How to Plan a Vegetable Garden

Most failed vegetable gardens were lost at the planning stage, not the growing stage. Here is the order to do it in.

The two most common ways a first garden fails are planting far more than the household eats, and planting everything at once so it all arrives in the same fortnight. Both are planning problems, and both are fixed before you touch a spade.

Work through these six steps in order. Each one narrows the next, which is why the order matters more than the detail.

1. Start with what you actually eat

Write down the vegetables your household eats in a normal week. Not the ones you admire in catalogues, the ones that get used. That list is your garden, and everything else is a hobby crop you can add once the basics are running.

Then be honest about effort. A bed of salad leaves needs picking twice a week or it bolts. A pumpkin needs one afternoon in spring and one in autumn. If your life is busy, weight the plan towards the pumpkin end.

2. Work out how much, before how many

This is where most plans go wrong. Six zucchini plants will bury a family. One or two is usually plenty. Four tomato plants feed a household fresh; twenty is a sauce operation and a different project.

Rather than guess, work backwards from what you eat. The harvest calculator does that arithmetic for you: tell it your household size and what you want to grow, and it tells you how many plants and how much bed space that means.

3. Read the site before you draw anything

Spend a day watching the patch. Almost every siting mistake comes from guessing at these four things instead of checking:

• Sun. Six hours minimum for fruiting crops, tomatoes, capsicum, cucumbers, beans. Leafy crops and most herbs will take four. Note where the shade falls in the morning and the afternoon, and remember it moves through the year.
• Water. How far is the tap? A bed at the end of a hose you resent dragging is a bed that gets neglected in the week it matters most.
• Wind. A hot dry wind does more damage than a cold one. If the patch is exposed, plan the windbreak as part of the garden rather than as an afterthought.
• Drainage. Watch where the water sits after heavy rain. Ground that stays wet needs raised beds, not hope.

4. Lay out the beds

Two rules cover most of it. Make beds narrow enough to reach the middle from either side, which is about 1.2 metres or four feet for most people, and never walk on the growing soil. Compaction is slow to build and slow to undo.

• Paths wide enough for the barrow, not just for you. A path you cannot wheel down becomes a path you carry buckets along.
• Tall crops on the shade side, so corn and staked tomatoes do not shade everything behind them. In the southern hemisphere that is the southern edge, in the northern hemisphere the northern.
• Perennials in their own bed. Asparagus, rhubarb and herbs stay put for years and should not be in ground you want to dig over each season.
• Put the things you pick constantly nearest the door. Herbs and salad by the kitchen, storage crops further out. This one small decision decides whether you use the garden.

Draw it once you know the shape. The bed planner holds your real bed sizes, spaces plants correctly as you place them, and warns you when two things you have put side by side should not be.

5. Put it on a calendar, not in a season

"Spring" is not a planting date. What matters is your own frost window and your own climate, which is why the same crop is sown months apart in two towns a few hours' drive from each other.

Set your region once with the region finder and every sowing date on the site adjusts to it. Then plan sowings in small repeated batches rather than one large one, so lettuce arrives over two months instead of all in one week.

6. Decide what follows what

A plan that only covers this season is half a plan. The bed that grows tomatoes this year should not grow them again next year, and knowing that now saves you rearranging in a hurry later.

Group crops by family, keep each family moving to a different bed each year, and slot a soil-building crop into the gap. The rotation tool tracks what each bed has held and tells you what should go in next, which is considerably easier than remembering.

The mistakes worth avoiding

• Starting too big. One bed done well beats four done badly, and it is far easier to add a bed next season than to rescue a garden that got away from you.
• Planting the whole packet. Sow a short row, then another a fortnight later.
• Forgetting the paths. They are not wasted space, they are the reason the beds stay productive.
• Ignoring height. The sweet corn that was a good idea in October is a wall of shade in January.
• No plan for the glut. Decide now whether the excess gets frozen, pickled or given away, because deciding in February with a box of tomatoes on the bench never goes well.

Next: Companion planting, Trellis and supports, and Growing food in small spaces if the patch is a balcony rather than a backyard.