Planning & Plotting Your Market (or Backyard) Garden | An Intro to the Seed Quantity Calculators & Yield Charts

Laying out a market garden is one of the harder yearly jobs in vegetable growing because you're juggling so many goals at once: rotations, planting dates, days to maturity, harvest length, available labor, even microclimates. You also have to account for recommended spacing to work out how many plants will fit.

It's a complicated, step-by-step process that shifts every year, so you plan with one eye on next season and the other on last season's lessons. These tips will help make it easier year after year.

Bed feet and row feet

How bed feet and row feet differ.

Experienced growers simplify things by splitting a farm or market garden into management units. The acre is the classic large unit, depending on your scale and layout. On a mid-size farm a unit might be a whole field; on a small farm, a block of beds; in a garden, a single bed.

Talking "per acre" can be confusing when you mean the area actually planted. So big units are often broken down further into rows, beds or even square feet, as in a backyard garden, to match the space where crops actually grow.

For smaller units, many growers like the linear bedfoot, a 1-foot-long section across a bed, for their calculations. Others use the row foot (plural row feet) or, in metric, row meter(s).

In this article and our charts and calculators we use row feet, along with row feet per acre, so most growers can work out how much seed or how many transplants they need. By row feet we mean the combined length of every row of a given crop. With one row per bed, row feet and bed feet are the same.

Breaking a big goal into smaller pieces of time and space is the heart of project management, and it's what lets you get started. Use whatever units work best for you. The point of your plan is to work more efficiently, with less labor and waste, while giving each crop the best possible conditions.

Transplanted vegetables • plant quantity and yield chart, plus row feet per acre

Here are the basic steps and things to think about as you plan.

• Decide how much of each crop you want to harvest, based on your markets and past experience. Some of the best planning advice for growers of any size comes from engineer Mel Bartholomew in his well-known book, Square Foot Gardening: picture the harvest before you plant.
• Then work backward to figure out how many plants it takes to grow that amount.
• Work out how much space those plants need.

Several tools can speed up these calculations, including the yield charts and seed calculators below.

Direct-sown vegetables • seed quantity and yield chart

• Seed quantity calculator: an interactive tool that tells you ahead of time how many seeds or plants you need for a given space.
  
  In Option 1, first pick metric or imperial units, then choose the crop, then say whether you're direct-sowing or transplanting, and finally enter your row feet. The calculator shows how much seed or how many transplants you need.
  
  In Option 2, first pick metric or imperial units, then enter the in-row spacing, then your row feet, and finally the number of rows. The calculator shows how much seed or how many transplants you need.

• These two charts do the same job if you'd rather calculate it yourself.
• For crops started indoors and transplanted out once conditions allow, use this chart:
  Transplanted vegetables • plant quantity and yield chart, plus row feet per acre • CHART
• For crops sown directly in the ground, use this chart:
  Direct-sown vegetables • typical seed needed and typical yield per row or acre • CHART

Example 4- and 5-year rotations from the farm case studies in Crop Rotation on Organic Farms

For more on crop rotation, see Choosing cover crops: 5 steps to decide what to plant, when and where…

Rotating crops over the years is essential to success with vegetables. It breaks pest, weed and disease cycles and helps even out nutrients across the farm.

Start by looking at plant families. Move crops so the same family doesn't grow on the same ground in back-to-back years.

A rotation should run at least three years, and four or five is better. Ideally you'll move crops through your management units with four or five units in a long rotation.

Group crops by how and when you grow them: sowing method and timing, but also cultivation, row cover, days to maturity, how many drip lines they need, water and nutrient needs, and pest control.

A notched planting board of rot-resistant wood is handy in small spaces such as raised beds, or anywhere hand-sowing makes sense.

Keeping crops with similar needs close together speeds up the work and keeps the field tidier later on. Planting lettuce and onions in the same bed might seem handy because both go in at the same time in spring, but the lettuce is harvested within about 45 days while storage onions may stay in for 100 days or more, leaving a bed to weed and water long after the lettuce is gone. Try to group crops that go in and come out at about the same time.

Place crops according to how they're harvested. Heavy crops like watermelons and sweet corn need a tractor or truck to haul them out, while salad mix fits in a tub. Plan field access around these needs.

With all that in mind, start mapping. Some growers use spreadsheets, some use apps, some put each crop on its own index card. Others draw the season on graph paper, then cut the pieces apart and rearrange them for the next year.

Whatever method you use, building a multiyear plan takes real skill and foresight. You'll fine-tune it every year, but once it's in place it will be one of your farm's most valuable tools.