Plan your garden.
Organization can yield a bountiful harvest
In her 16 years of gardening experience, Megan Cain has noticed that the most successful gardeners have one thing in common: they give their gardens some thought before the season begins.
“They come up with a simple plan, or at least have a general idea,” she said. Without a plan, it’s hard to get the results you want out of your garden.
For experienced gardeners, planning includes evaluating the previous year’s garden and plotting what and when to plant to yield the harvest they want throughout the season. It’s what Cain has been doing for years, pulling from the knowledge she’s accumulated through research and experience working on farms, teaching gardening classes and cultivating nearly 100 varieties of vegetables in her 1,600square-foot front yard garden in Madison. But for beginners, this can be daunting. “A lot of people feel they should be planning but don’t know what to do,” Cain said.
So Cain published a book that walks beginners through the planning process and includes all the essential details experienced gardeners take into consideration — things like plant size, growth time and harvest length.
“It was taking all this stuff in my head and putting it into a book where people could follow the process and create a garden plan,” she said.
“Smart Start Garden Planner: Your Step-byStep Guide to a Successful Season,” ($29 in print, $17 in ebook, available at
is a colorful, workbook-style guide packed with equal parts inspiring garden photos (all taken in Cain’s expansive garden) and fundamental gardening information.
The book’s goal is to help gardeners create “a beautiful garden that yields lots of food for the least amount of time and money invested,” Cain writes in the introduction.
That’s an appealing objective for any gardener. Cain takes it beyond the vegetables though and starts with a more holistic question: What do you want more of in your life? Physical activity? Time with family? Visual beauty? Cooking skills? Whatever it is, you can use your garden to help you pursue those goals.
“The more you get into gardening, the more it bleeds into your whole life,” Cain said. “Maybe you’re cooking more, eating healthier, being outside in nature, becoming attuned to the weather and seasonal changes ... maybe you’re in front of the TV or computer less. You’re using your body, connecting with the seasons and insects and animals.”
The book includes worksheets with space to dream, prioritize and plan. The “What do I want to grow?” worksheet asks questions like, “What does my family eat and buy from the grocery store on a regular basis?” and, “Which foods provide the highest value? What’s expensive to buy or difficult to find in winter?” along with, “What will make me happy to grow in my garden?”
“I can’t tell people what to grow, so I wanted to write a book to lead people through the garden in a personal process,” Cain said. “It’s really about the reader — having them examine and reflect and plan for themselves.”
Cain’s expertise comes into play when it comes to making decisions about what seeds to plant, when and where. She leads you through the many factors to consider for each plant.
Once you decide what to plant, the book helps you create a planting schedule, with information on when to plant what vegetables and how to plant them, space them and design your garden for visual interest.
With her own garden located in her front and side yards, Cain is a proponent for vegetables as landscaping as well as food.
“I’m definitely partial to interesting, colorful varieties that produce well and taste good,” Cain said.
“I like that (my garden is) up front,” she said. “It’s the center of our landscape, so we’re out in it a lot. It’s been an amazing way to meet so many people in our neighborhood.”
It’s a huge contrast to her home growing up in Philadelphia, where they didn’t have a yard and she didn’t know anyone who gardened. “We didn’t even eat very many vegetables,” Cain said. In her mid-20s, Cain did an internship on a farm in Missouri that changed her life. “That’s when I fell in love with gardening,” she said. After working on farms in Hawaii, California, Washington and Oregon as a part of Willing Workers On Organic Farms (WWOOF), she moved to Madison to help develop a youth gardening program.
Four years ago, Cain launched creativevegetablegardener.com, where she blogs and leads an online gardening club and Facebook group (facebook.com/groups/MakeYourHarvestLast.)
“My purpose is to help people get the most from their gardens and celebrate the beauty and joy of gardening,” she said.
For her, one source of joy is that “it’s just a big experiment year after year. As you build your knowledge, you become more confident in your experimentation.”
“That’s one of the things that keeps it so engaging and fun,” she said. “You never really master it. You can become more experienced, but the deeper you get, you realize there’s more and more to learn.”
For beginners, Cain said building skills and knowledge is an important foundation, and “Smart Start Garden Planner” is an approachable place to start. But if things don’t turn out according to the plan? “New gardeners often blame themselves when things go wrong. With experience, you realize there’s a certain amount of mystery involved in gardening,” Cain said.