Spring is just around the corner, and now is the perfect time to start planning a garden! If you aren’t sure where to start, here are 12 steps about how to plan a garden for beginners.
How to Plan a Garden for Beginners
Ready to learn how to grow your own food? Here’s the steps I take to plan my vegetable gardens.
1. Find a spot
The first thing to consider when planning your garden is where it will be! If you live in an apartment, you can grow microgreens indoors, use a vertical growing tower on your balcony, or plant in some small pots. If you have a small backyard, look for a flat, sunny spot. Or if you live on acres of land, consider how close you want your garden to your home and how you will get water to it.
2. Consider Your Budget when Thinking About How to Plan a Garden for Beginners
Gardening can be expensive, but there are also affordable ways to go about it! Start by thinking about how much money you can spend on garden start up costs and maintenance. You’ll refer back to this number during the later planning stages of your garden.
3. Consider Your Time
Gardening is a time-intensive hobby. You have to make plans, shop for seeds, and then maintain the weeds! If you work full time outside of the home and have extremely busy weekends, a large garden may be difficult to maintain. If you’re a young mama with little kids, you might want to start with a few raised beds and then add from there. We started with a few raised beds before committing to trying to grow most of our produce. Consider your time and your capacity.
4. Think About Your Goals
What are your gardening goals? Do you want to grow a few tomatoes and herbs or try to grow all of your produce to preserve and store away? Do you want to involve your kids? Or do you want to grow to sell? Consider the possibilities and what you actually want to accomplish with your garden. This will help you determine what size to make it and how much to grow in it.
5. Decide What Type of Garden
Determine what type of garden you want to plant: a no-till, raised beds, tilled garden, container garden, or a combination?
No-till gardens are affordable and can improve the quality of your soil over time. They aren’t as structured and organized as raised-bed gardens but can still be beautiful.
Tilled gardens can help you initially get rid of a lot of weeds, but you may see a better harvest over time with a method like no-til that doesn’t disturb or take nutrients away from the soil.
Container gardens are perfect if you don’t have a lot of space. I’ve heard great things about
to make the most of your space!
Raised beds are beautiful and can look very elegant; however, they are expensive to build and fill! We built ours out of cedar fence posts because it was affordable! Our raised bed plans are included in The New Homesteader’s Handbook here.
Consider the pros and cons and decide what works best with the space you have!
6. Determine Your Zone when Considering How to Plan a Garden for Beginners
You can determine your gardening zone by putting your zip code in here. This will help you know when to plant based off of your first and last frost dates. Find your estimated frost dates here. It will also help you know which plants and varieties can thrive in your growing zone.
7. Think About What You Like to Eat
There is no point in spending hours and hours planning and planting food that your family won’t eat. Grow what you already love and enjoy cooking with, and then maybe try one or two new things that you aren’t as familiar with. Just because you see people growing lots of beets and carrots on Instagram doesn’t mean you should unless you actually will eat them. Grow what you love! I like to purchase my seeds from True Leaf Market and Botanical Interests because they offer organic, heirloom, and non-GMO varieties.
8. Map Out Spacing + Planting Dates when Thinking about How to Plan a Garden for Beginners
My garden goal last year was to try to grow most of our produce. So, I did a quick google search for how many of each plant I needed to plant to feed my family of four. I wrote it down on this chart, and then calculated the planting dates for my zone using this website. I made notes of the spacing and tried to fit as much as I could in the space that I had. The back of your seed packets will tell you when to plant based off of the frost dates in your area.
9. Order Seeds or Get Starts
Last year, I did a combination! My seeds that I started indoors honestly didn’t do very well, but most of the ones that I direct sowed outside did great. Starting seeds indoors can take more work and time, but it can save you money! If you don’t have the time or materials, you could buy a few starts from your local garden center or do a combination of both.
10. Make Sure You Have a Watering System
We started off watering our large garden by hand, but our hose didn’t even reach the entire way. Instead, I ended up watering with a bucket by hand. It was rough. My husband designed a drip line system which you can read about here that made watering a breeze. It was an initial investment that more than paid itself off in time and labor. I honestly think the drip line is the only reason my garden survived the high heat!
If you don’t have the time or funds to install a drip line system, a watering hose will work great! Just make sure that you buy one that is long enough and learn from my mistake.
11. Get a Few Gardening Tools
A few of my must-have gardening tools include a shovel, wheelbarrow, hand trowel, rake, garden fork, and pruning shears. Here are more of my favorite gardening tools.
12. Remember to Weed, Water, Fertilize, and Harvest!
If you are able to make gardening a regularly part of your daily rhythm, it will be a lot less overwhelming that trying to keep up with a completely overgrown garden a few months in! If you like spreadsheets, you could create a spreadsheet for when you need to plant and harvest, or use a pen-and-paper garden journal like this one. Don’t want to make your own? Get my garden planning spreadsheet here.
Decide if you want to use natural fertilizers or not. I use a combination of homemade fertilizers like compost, eggshells, and coffee grounds in addition to a few store-bought natural ones.
Check on your garden often and be prepared to harvest once your produce is ready!
I hope you have a wonderful gardening season! Gardening does take a lot of work, but it is truly rewarding.
This post was all about how to plan a garden for beginners.
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