#Burpee garden planner how to#
#Burpee garden planner pdf#

While we aren’t gardening all year round (one day, it’s the next dream/goal), we have monthly tasks to complete, whether to prepare the soil, clean up, or plan. This year I did a notebook with 12 blank monthly calendars. We get to eat fresh and share with family and friends. We also love the bees and butterflies visiting us throughout the spring and summer. He enjoyed looking through our seed catalogs and choosing what seeds to add to our collection. He loves helping start the seeds and checking them every morning to see if any seeds are popping up through the soil. Every year we learn more and now that our son is turning five, the experience is even better.

We are on our 4th gardening season in New England. When we first started looking for a home to buy, we knew we needed great yard for gardening and our newborn son to play. Tell us a little bit about your family garden and what it means to you

#Burpee garden planner how to#

We were lucky enough to connect with home gardener Kelly Faraday to give us the 101 on how to use a planner to prepare for and plant the garden of your dreams. I don’t have high hopes for that kale – I think it will get too hot before it matures.Spring has officially sprung and the season of planting and pruning is among us! Whether you’re harvesting from a homestead or have just a few planters on a patio, your planner can be an incredible garden tool (move over hand trowel!). I’m experimenting with interplanting (planting a fast-growing crop in between a slower-growing one). But I was anxious to see some green in the garden beds and know that I’m starting a little late on my cool season crops. Buying and planting loose leaf lettuce that is nearly harvest-ready seems like cheating, like letting loose dozens of quail in front of your rifle and calling it hunting. Jarrod and I also hit up Gethsemane Garden Center to pick up some transplants. Sorry, clicking this image won’t make it any bigger. It is with some shame that I confess that I made a spreadsheet in Google Docs to record and track the plants I plan hope to grow: My shopping process was heavily swayed by product proclamations like “Customer favorite!” and “It doesn’t get any easier!” and “If you kill this you should probably just quit.” My selections included tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, snap peas, green beans, cucumber and zucchini. I placed an order through Burpee for an assortment of vegetables and herbs. The best part of this planning tool is that it generates a gardening plan with instructions and tips for each of the plants you selected: I myself take the #2 from Hyde Park – it would take a lot more than some graph paper to be a stand-out nerd on that bus.Īfter this initial draft, I discovered the Kitchen Garden Planner on Gardener’s Supply Company’s website and put together a couple of plans.īack garden bed – I modified this one in Photoshop to show the single row of lettuce and spinach I planted along the front of the bed:

#Burpee garden planner pdf#

Once lettuce season has passed, that square will be filled with a second season crop, like bush beans.ĭownload some free graph paper (I like the customizable PDF options on this site) and nerd it up on your ride home from work. This approach also seemed like the easiest way to sow seeds at different times – one square will be planted with lettuce now, another square in one week and so on until the end of May – extending the harvest and increasing the likelihood that at least one square of each crop will survive. Tomatoes and broccoli get their own squares, whereas lettuce can be planted four heads to a square. There are a lot of guides online – basically, for each square foot, you plant 1, 4, 9 or 16 plants, depending on mature size. Square foot gardening seems like the right option for the space I have available. What do you do to ward off disappointment? Excessive, exhaustive planning! Bring on the graph paper.

Therefore, the risk of spending so much time and money on the raised beds I built is that I’ll be disappointed if they don’t produce a bounty of food. (For the record: Taco Night yields the optimal ratio of minutes spent-to-units of consumption enjoyment.) Projects I find most satisfying, like the catio portal, come together with minimal hassle and no last-minute trips to The Home Depot. Every minute over 30 spent making dinner, for example, leads to 5 diminished units of consumption enjoyment. The law of diminishing returns reigns supreme around here.