Planting Plan

In order to achieve best results, it's essential to plan our beds and our garden layout.  Bringing order to chaos will also help us as we move forward in keeping things like crop rotation straight.  In the Row Caterpillar post, we discussed the design of a bed.  The important take away that we got from that, was the amount of space we require for each bed.  It's easy to squeeze a lot of beds together for optimal use of space, but if you're going to do anything with row covers or season extension techniques, it's essential to have room to work with.  To that end, here's the final design of a bed in our garden:

As we can see, the actual growing bed takes up less than half the space required in the floor plan.  The passive solar heating plastic drums and the 6 Mil plastic tapered to prevent the wind from blowing the caterpillar tunnel away, all consume space.  In the end, our available space allowed us to create 7 beds with two compost structures, one on the north and one on the south side.

Now that we know how many growing beds we have, it is time to determine what we are actually going to grow in them.  The golden rule here is to grow only crops that you actually eat today!  It is no use growing something that you're not going to eat.  The Three Sisters method advocates the growing of corn, beans and squash together.  That's great, but my family and I don't eat squash.  No particular reason.  It's just not something that we eat so assuming we'll develop a taste for it would be a gamble at best.  In such a case, we look at alternatives.  What else can we plant instead of squash that would have similar effects of shading out the soil from weeds etc.  For us, it was carrots.  Carrots go well with lots of crops and we love them.  Before we consider Companion Planting, the best approach is to determine the core crops we wish to grow.  Go about this as if you're only going to plant that one crop in a given bed.

Remember NOT to over plant any one crop since we need to ensure proper crop rotation in our beds from year to year.  The recommended rotation is 3 years.  That means that we strive NOT to plant the same core crop in the same bed over any 3 year span.  That gives us a mathematical formula we can use to determine the maximum number of beds we can plant with any one core crop.

Number of beds / 3 = Maximum beds per core crop (rounded down)

Since we have 7 beds we have 7/3=2.  That means we will plant no move than 2 beds with any one core crop.  For Year 1 we will attempt to adhere to keeping the tall crops on the north side of the garden so as to minimize the shade they throw on other beds.  With our beds aligned east/west, here's the plan for Year 1:

Tomatoes are in the north two beds while corn is in the east two beds, leaving lettuce, broccoli and potatoes to fill out the seven beds.  We will keep the corn beds next to each other on the north-south axis in order to help with pollination because the east-west axis would create a less condensed pollination field.  Corn is infamous for requiring a good number of plants to ensure proper pollination.  During Year 2, we will employ the following planting layout:

As we can see, we preserved the north-south axis for the corn, placing them in the middle while moving the tomatoes to the east beds.  This allows the lettuce, broccoli and potatoes to move over one bed each and fill out the western beds.  The tall corn and tomato crops should not shade out anything since they occupy their respective north-south axes.  During Year 3, we will employ the following planting plan:

During this season, we bump the tall corn to the west beds, but keep them on the north side.  Tomatoes take the third west bed as well as the south middle bed while lettuce takes the north middle bed.  The lettuce should do fine as the tomatoes aren't as tall as the corn and we can always prune them back to keep them lower than the other tomato bed.  Broccoli and potatoes fill out the east beds this year.

There we have it.  We now have a crop rotation schedule the avoids planting the same core crop in the same bed for 3 years and at the same time, we know how many beds we'll plant for each crop.  Having these figures in hand, we can start planning the Companion Planting for each bed in order to determine what secondary crops we will have in our intensive gardening layout.  Once we have completed that phase, we will know exactly how many seeds we need for each crop.