Plant on paper first before planting for real
How many times have you planted your spring garden and wished you had room for another row or two?
You think the planting is going fine until suddenly you are running short of space and you still have the snap beans, butterbeans, squash and peppers left to plant.
You wish you could go back and take out that extra row of corn you planted, but it’s too late. So you shrug your shoulders and plant fewer snap beans, butterbeans and squash than you really wanted and then go looking for buckets to plant the leftover pepper transplants in.
You don’t have to do that again; if you plant your spring garden on paper first. This is a good time to plan the garden on paper if you haven’t already done so. Once you’ve laid it out on paper, you’ll know exactly how many transplants you will need and how many feet of row of certain vegetables.
Just measure your garden space and then draw it to scale on paper. It’s easiest to do on graph paper. Then, being careful to allow all the room you need for rows and between-plant spacing, pencil in your garden.
This way when you plant one too many rows of corn, you can just go back and erase it. And you don’t have to throw transplants away when you run out of room.
Once the garden is laid out on paper the task of f i eld l ayout becomes that much easier. Plant taller vegetables toward the north side of the garden so they will not shade the shorter plants. As you lay out you garden, too, consider the yields of the plants. Do you need all those tomatoes that 50 tomato plants are going to produce?
Remember to plan first then plant.