Over the past few weeks I have shared loads of secrets about how I plan my garden each year. You can find a step by step plan here. In this plan I promised to explain Step 2 a little further. I wanted you to get all your seed info ready to plug into these great spreadsheets developed by Urban Farmer. Before I explained this step in detail. I would like to thank the Urban Farmer for making such great calculators. When I was searching for help in planning my garden a few years ago, I was so grateful for the work the folks at the Urban Farmer had done. Out of gratitude to them, I want to share their worksheet with you all. So lets jump into it.

Step 2: How much do I need to Grow

Lets start with The How Much to Plant Spreadsheet. I put in our family size and it calculated how many pounds I needed for each veggie to get through the year. Of course their yield are just estimates. It all depends on how fertile your soil is. This information is great but also very overwhelming. Everything is preset and if I try to change this spreadsheet to my row lengths it erases the formulas. So how was I ever going to figure out how I could ever reach these lofty numbers, if I grow in 30 ft by 30 in beds. Where I can fit more then one row of certain veggies. Of course I will have to do a little math. Here are the calculations.

Total Row Feet in How Much to Plant Column 2 ÷ My Bed Length= How many rows ÷ My Bed Rows = how much of my beds I will need for this Veggie.

Let’s look at tomatoes for example. I need 71 feet of tomatoes to yield 120# of tomatoes. Wow! That seems like a lot but just wait it will work out. If I have beds that are 30 feet long and I can fit one row of tomatoes in each bed (with companion plantings of Lettuce and marigolds of course) and I place my tomatoes 24” a part like my seed tracker says.

71 feet ÷ 30 foot beds = 2.367 beds ÷ 1 row = 2.367 beds

Okay, so that means I am going to need 2 and half beds of tomatoes to reach my goal of 120# I know that is a little bigger but i WANT a little bit of cushion against crop failure. Remember these are all estimates. I won’t know if half of my tomatoes will get taken out by tomato worms after I plant them. But I do now know how many beds I will need to dedicate to tomatoes.

Lets look at peas next. With Peas I can fit three rows of peas per bed.

13 feet ÷ 30 feet beds = .433 beds ÷3 rows = .1443 row of a bed. What! How long is that?

.1443 × 30 foot bed =4.329 feet of a bed. Okay, that better. Did you see how that worked?

Now I could put in my own numbers and figure our how many of my beds I am going to need to reach the total yield number. Remember back in the Seed Tracker Instructions I told you all these measurements were going to come in handy. I know this is a lot of downloads but if you want a tip about how to put all these spreadsheets in to one document.You can find my tips and tricks video in my membership area.

Another Tip:

I need start or buy 38 tomato plants. Now do these all need to be the same tomato variety, of course not. I like to raise about 6 different types. So if I divide 38 by 6 then I will need 6.3333 tomatoes of each variety. How do you plant or buy .333 of a tomato plant, you don’t, you just buy a couple more to account for any loses that might occur. Okay did I just give you a excuse to plant more tomatoes. Yes, of course I did, but I did say just a few more not a whole tray of tomatoes.

Now what do you do with all these numbers. The first thing would be to look at your seed inventory or your seed tracker and see if you need to order more seeds. Next you can start planning your garden beds now that you know how many rows you are going to need for all your veggies. In our next Seed and More Seeds post we are going to discuss planning your seedling timeline. Tell next time.

Don’t let the world hold you back, Pray, Just Plant!