Urban or Rural Homesteading: Plan Vegetable Garden Now

Posted on January 9, 2009
Filed Under Homesteading, frugal living | 6 Comments

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It’s January and in most places it’s cold and snowy. It hardly seems the time to be thinking about gardening, however, this is the time to start planning your garden. Good planning now means that you might have vegetables earlier in the year. Now is the time to order seed catalogs, plan what type of garden you can have, and decide what types of vegetables that you want to order.

Garden Planning

The amount of space and time you have for a garden will determine what type of garden you will have.

Urban or Apartment Garden

It is possible to have a garden in an apartment or small yard. If you have space limitations, you will want to do your gardening in containers. Here are 12 vegetables that you can grow in a container and you aren’t just limited to vegetables. Herbs by nature make great container gardens and it allows you to snip enough for cooking without even going outside. All you need is 8 hours of bright sunlight to grow vegetables inside and enough time to pick.

Suburban Gardening

If you live in the suburbs and have a yard and don’t mind converting some of it to garden space, you can make a square foot garden. Square foot gardens are more efficient than regular gardens and with careful planning you can grow as much in a 4 ft X 4 ft space as you could in a small conventional garden. For example, a 10 ft row of bush beans (green beans) will produce 3-5 lbs of beans. In a square foot garden, you would need 5 squares of beans to produce this same amount. There are 16 squares in a 4′ x 4′ garden so the beans would only take up a little over 1/4 of the garden. You reuse the squares as the plants stop producing so it is possible to use those squares later in the season for growing fall vegetables. Square foot gardens are also less time intensive as there is no tilling, weeding, etc.

Rural Gardening

If you have the space and time, you can have a traditional garden. These will need to be tilled or plowed up and then planted. They are more time intensive as there is much more weeding, cultivating, etc but they do offer more options for planting a larger amount of vegetables as well as more types of vegetables.

Whatever type of garden you decide on, now is the time to start planning the space, types of vegetables and amount of seed you will need to buy. The following are links to different seed companies who send out free catalogs. Click on the links to request a catalog.

Free Garden Planner Spreadsheets

I offer two different automated garden planner spreadsheets. The first will calculate when you should plant different vegetables based on your estimated last frost date.

The second will help you calculate how much you need to plant based on the number of people in your family and how much seed or plants to buy.

I hope to have the How much you need to plant spreadsheet converted for a square foot garden soon.

I hope these will help you to plan a successful garden.

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Comments

6 Responses to “Urban or Rural Homesteading: Plan Vegetable Garden Now”

D on January 9th, 2009 1:52 pm

What perfect timing for this post. We have been discussing our plans to do our first garden this year. We just found out that we have a severely allergic son. He can not have corn, soy, or milk. Basically he can have very little processed food–no high fructose corn syrup which is in practically everything!

So we plan to plant a raised garden bed in our back yard. This information is very helpful! Thank you for the post!
marci on January 10th, 2009 1:12 am

Good timely post. And remember permanent edible landscaping! Convert some of your yard and landscaping over to edibles – you won’t be sorry!
And plan also for a winter garden.

Right now, thru the snow and all, I still have things growing. Lots of brussel sprouts, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, kales, cabbage, celery, peas, swiss chard and some herbs. In the house I have stored so much from the summer and fall garden, including potatoes squashes unprocessed. Just picked fresh veggies – What a nice treat in the dead of winter!

In the edible landscaping areas, I have all kinds of berry bushes, currents, asparagus, rhubarb, strawberries, kales, and about 20 other varieties that will pop back up when spring arrives. As well as dwarf fruit trees.

And all that on a small 50×100 lot that my house sits on. This was my 2nd year, and I am sooo looking forward to expanding everything next year! I really encourage you to try it!
cindys on January 10th, 2009 8:19 am

D, I hope the links will help you plan your garden.

Marci, Wow! Your yard must be a wonderful! I wish you had pictures. I would love to add berry bushes and fruit trees but can’t afford it right now, however, it is in my plans for the future.
deRuiter on March 1st, 2009 11:25 am

Cindy, You CAN afford to start your garden! Pick out a sunny spot in the yard, and when the weather breaks, skim off the sod and compost it. Turn over the soil with a shovel and rake. You don’t need a fancy drum for composting, just a couple of worn out trash cans, even ones with the bottom missing. Tuck these in an unobtrusive corner of the garden and pile in all the sod you’ve removed, and as you cut the lawn, put in the grass clippings and weeds which you pull. The process of composting will heat up the contents of the barrels and make you beautiful humus. Add every scrap of kitchen waste (not meat) to the barrels all year round. Leave the tops off and rain water and air will get in to break down the organic matter into humus. BUY A COUPLE OF BERRY BUSHES, GRAPE VINES, DWARF FRUIT TREES, OR WHATEVER YOU WANT MOST this year to get them started. Some Asparagus plants and strawberries are very inexpensive. Then plant the rest of the garden with vegetable seeds. Every spring you empty the compost bins onto the garden for the humus. Find a riding stable or horse farm and bring home fresh manure and put it in compost bins. I clean out stalls from a local barn for the manure and wood shavings horse bedding and spread this on the garden in the fall to till under in the spring. We also bed the rhubarb plants with this horse bedding as soon as they tips of the plants appear in the spring, and then again before the frost. Gardening doesn’t require a lot of money. Ask friends for cuttings of horse radish, perennial herbs, fruit bushes. Go on Craigslist and Freecycle and ASK for garden plants. Shop Rite Grocery store has a rack of seeds every year which are 5 packs for a dollar, and we’ve had great germination success with these cheapies. Fruit and vardening costs very little for a large reward in fresh produce, improved soil structure, investment of almost no fossil fuels, less organic matter going into the landfill, and exercise and fresh air. who needs a gym with a garden to tend? When the ground isn’t frozen, I take each day’s kitchen waste into the garden, dig a hole and bury it. This quickly turns the waste into humous and the action of diggin the holes turns under weeds. A garden’s a cheap hobby with great rewards.
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