Planning Your Potager Layout

When I first starting running these 'plan your potager' workshops, I thought it was going to be pretty easy. Give everyone a plan or two to work from (like those ones you see advertised in the garden planners all the time) and talk a bit about how to plant and grow, bingo and done.

As I started to put it on paper though, I realised that it was not nearly that simple. We all like to eat and grow different foods, have different needs from our gardens, have differing yards with more or less sun, wind, wildlife, and varying experience with growing.

Therefore, sadly, without coming to your house, it is simply not possible to give you a set plan and say here you go, plant your garden like this. However, if you follow these steps, I have made it make sense (I hope) so that you will have a food garden that works for your family, growing what you like to grow and eat.

Planning out your garden takes much longer than the actual planting up does so is a good idea to do it up ahead of time. Can you wing it? Of course you can! If, however, you want to grow as much as you can and want them to thrive, is good to make at least a cursory planting plan. You can change things about a bit as you start planting (I do it all the time, I am fickle like that, haha) but I like to have a basic idea of what veggies I am planting where.

There are TWO parts to making a planting plan. First, deciding what you are going to be growing. Second, figuring out what to plant where for the best results.

Planning out your beds, what to plant where, takes a lot of time, no matter who you are but especially if you are newer to gardening. Even professional growers, who make a living growing groceries in urban gardens, say that making the plan is the most time consuming part. So grab yourself a cup of coffee and some snacks, find a quiet space to spread out and work, dive in.

The steps in deciding ''What To Grow'

This first part is similar to the post I made about how to decide what seeds to buy . This will help you figure out how much room you need for what you want to grow.

1. What does your family eat? Make a list of all the veggies, fruits, berries that each member of your family eats, from parents to teens and toddlers, too.

It is easy to get carried away at the nursery seed counter but if you do some planning first, you will know exactly what to buy. Whether you go from seed or plant does not matter, all that matters is that you grow great organic food for you and the family.

If your family loves smoothies, you will want to plan for lots of greens like spinach, kale, lettuce, plus carrots, beets, strawberries. Whatever goes into the morning smoothie.

If, on the other hand you only eat a certain vegetable on occasion, or only one person in the family likes it, it may be better to buy that item at the market and save the growing space for other things. If you like parsnips, as I do, but no one else will touch them, do not waste the space but rather buy the occasional parsnip for your roasted veggie dinner.

2. How much space do you have in your garden? If your garden is roomy, fill it up with all the things that you eat. In my last garden, I had room for it all. Anything I wanted, including pumpkins for the grandkids. Now, however, I have to be choosy as we have about a tenth of the garden space.

If you have to pick and choose, some people like to pick the more expensive items to grow and buy the cheaper ones at the grocers. Some like to grow more of things they can freeze, dry, store, or can. Some grow just the things they want for fresh eating in summer.

Squash takes up a lot of room and is relatively inexpensive, so you may want to leave the zucchini and butternuts off your list. We love to grow and eat heirloom tomatoes, bell peppers, and English cucumbers.

Keep in mind that you do not have to just grow them in traditional beds, you can use pots, planters, hanging baskets (for lettuces and peas), and window boxes. Grow your food vertically, too, on trellises, fences, stakes, or obelisks, to save space. Peas, beans, squash, can all grow up. Potatoes in pots are great, saving that space for other things. I also grow all my peppers and eggplants in pots as they produce better for me that way.

3. Do you do any canning? Dehydrating? Freezing? If you make salsa for Taco Tuesdays, or sauces for pasta nights, pizza sauce or ketchup, plant lots of tomatoes.

If you like dried fruits, grow some sour cherries (the Sweetheart series is wonderful and super hardy), strawberries, apples, rhubarb, etc..

Freeze your peas, beans, broccoli, tomatoes (whole).

Make sauerkraut, pickled beets and carrots? If you do any of this, add those fruits and veggies to your grow list.

We do a whole lot of canning and dehydrating. We grow for fresh eating but grow a whole lot more to fill the pantry with year-round organic food. Some veggies store fresh in a cold room, like spaghetti squash and carrots, while others are processed so jars of sauces line the shelves. I also love dehydrated fruits, like the cherries I mentioned above, pears, apples, strawberries. You can also dehydrate your garlic for homemade garlic powder/salt, all kinds of herbs, plus grow your own chili powder, cayenne, and paprika powder (these are all from peppers, btw, just in case you did not know).

Yellow Icebox Watermelon - great for short summer areas.

4. Know your garden zone and climate so you know what you can grow and when to plant it. Here is a really good planting guide. Google up the last average frost date for your area, put it into the box at the top and it calculates the planting/sowing dates for you.

Make a layout of your garden beds. Does not have to be fancy.

How to put a plan on paper

Now the hard part... putting those plants down on paper so you know what to plant where. You will get better at this with experience. With time, you will just know how far apart your plants are grown and their water needs so will be much less time consuming to figure out the plan. You will also get to know your yard and garden to know what thrives best where.

I am going to share some guidelines to help you get started. Don't stress about it, truly! Just plant and try things out. Guaranteed that most all of your plants will thrive and produce if you have good soil and sunshine. Some veggies will not do as well and that may be because of the weather, the season, the variety, pests, etc... there are so many factors that come into play and most of them are out of your hands. Plan, plant, harvest, enjoy your harvest.

1. Draw out your garden beds on grid paper, or computer paper, in your journal, wherever you like. I sometimes put in the journal so that I can look back on it year after year but I most often draw out my yard, my gardens on a sheet of paper and take a copy of it for next year. It does not have to be fancy, just a fairly good idea of the size of the beds and draw them big enough that you can plot in the veggies that you want to grow in each bed.

Your drawing can be as simple or as fancy as you like. I only make very basic ones, like what you see above. I then can put the right veggies into the right areas. You may want more detailed drawings.

2. Take the list of fruits and veggies that you made above.

If you are planting fruit trees or shrubs, put them on your plan first. They may take a few years to start producing, so get them in right away.

Next decide where perennial and long lived fruits/veggies will go as they will stay in place. These are things like asparagus, horseradish, rhubarb, and strawberries (not perennial but are only replaced every 3rd or 4th year). There is nothing worse than planting asparagus and then deciding that you have have to move it in a year or two as it takes 3 to 5 years before you really start to get a good harvest.

Pink Porcelain Pumpkin

3. Put the annual veggies from your list into three columns... cool weather, hot weather, and long season. Knowing their needs will help you plot them out on your plan, making sure that you do not plant up your prime tomato location with long season crops.

You may want to make two copies of your garden so that you can plan out your cool season and long season crops on one copy, your heat lovers on the other copy.

Cool Weather - planted in spring, harvested before the heat comes, bolts in summer (or grow in in a shaded area). Sow more in mid-summer for harvest in fall.

Warm Weather - heat lover that cannot tolerate frosts or cold temps.

Long Season - have a long growing season of 80 to 100 days till maturity. You plant in spring and harvest in fall or early winter. Things like the brussels can even handle snow! You plant them in spring and harvest for Thanksgiving. Parsnips and Leeks would also go into this column, if you are growing them. I would put kale in this row as it is not pulled out for summer like the other cool season crops. Here is my veggie list for this year.

Cool Weather	Warm Weather	Long Season	Winter
Broccolini	Beans	Brussels Sprouts	Garlic
Cauliflower	Beets	Cabbage
Lettuce/Greens	Cucumbers	Carrots
Peas	Eggplants	Celery
Radishes	Melons	Onions
Scallions	Peppers
Spinach	Potatoes
Turnips	Rutabaga
	Squash - Winter
	Tomatoes
	Zucchini

Make sure that everything on your grow list works in your zone. Things like watermelon need a lot of heat and take a long time so will benefit from a heated greenhouse to extend the season.

Cool season crops like peas, onions, lettuce and greens can be sown in temps as low as +1°C (35°F) and the other cool season just a few weeks later, at around +4°C (40°F) so mid April and early May here on the prairies, give or take a week or two, depending on the weather.

Sow seeds as early as soil can be worked, or buy/grow seedlings that you can pop into the garden a few weeks later. I grow more cool season crops in spring than I do in late summer as I have less space (and energy) later in the summer. For continuous food, sow or plant something into any empty spots that come about as you harvest.

Tomatoes need lots of sunshine and warmth to develop that rich, deep, tomato flavour that we all love.

4. Most all fruits and veggies will need 6 to 8 hours of sunshine to thrive and to taste richer, sweeter, better.

The veggies that make (juicy) fruits, like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, corn, artichokes, eggplants, beets, onions, carrots, etc will all need more sunshine, while veggies that make just stalks/greenery generally need much less, things like lettuce, kale, scallions, cabbage can pretty much grow in the shade.

In my drawing you will see that on the north side of my yard, that strip between the fence and the house, I have a shade bed where I can grow my lettuces, spinach, radishes, greens of all sorts that are cool weather lovers and tend to bolt in the heat. This area only gets about 4 hours of sunshine in total, about 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours again in the evening as the sun sets.

The other side yard, the one on the south side, gets a lot of sun, is a hot area so great for melons, grapes, squash, the sun lovers and out of zone plants.

Tomatoes in June, interplanted with marigolds, basil, parsley, watered with weeping hoses.

5. Plan for putting veggies with the same watering needs together, in the same bed. Water less often but deeply to develop great strong root systems, and thus healthier plants. I use these flat weeping hoses that you see in the above picture.

Most all veggies only require water a good, deep watering once a week, every 5 to 7 days. When I was working outside of the home, I watered on the weekends. During the week, my days were too long and busy for me to make it out to the garden, and I do not water in the evening as wet soil or leaves causes powdery mildew.

So, things like potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, broccoli, cabbage, just about everything only needs one good soak a week. If you got some rain during the week, I would still water on watering day unless it was a really long, steady drenching rain. A sprinkle (or a sprinkler, hah!) only wets the surface of the soil, does not water the roots of the plants.

Tomatoes I water every 3rd day with a good deep soak, so twice a week and the same with squash, though it can easily also go once a week. If you overwater tomatoes and peppers, you will get very bland tasting fruits, just watery and tasteless. Let them go dry in between watering so that they develop that rich flavour. Peppers I grow in pots and only water once a week.

Cabbages get very big! Here I have 3 per row in my 4 foot wide beds.

6. Spacing is key. If you are new to gardening, follow the spacing recommended on the seed package or the plant label. You will have great veggies as they will have room to grow and you will get to know your plants. Seedlings are so tiny that it is hard to imagine that those cabbages will be 18 inches wide in late summer! I have 3 cabbages per row here in my 4 foot wide beds, 3 different varieties of cabbage.

If you have been gardening for a few summers now and are familiar with how plants grow and size up, shake it up a bit and try something new... intensive planting. Plant them just a few inches closer to each other and the rows closer together. Only do this if you have good air flow in your garden. I do not plant my tomatoes or squash closer together, I follow the guidelines for them as they are very prone to mildew and I want good crops.

However, I do interplant with other plants. Interplant tall plants with sprawling plants or with root crops. Grow spaghetti squash at the base of your corn or onions between your cabbages, carrots between your dale, cauli, or broccoli. Plant a bit more intensively for a bigger harvest. Just make sure you do not water with a wand that wets the leaves, water in the mornings at soil level only. If you want to read more about this, it is often called interplanting or French Intensive gardening.

7. Add flowers and herbs to your garden to attract beneficial insects and pollinators. The beneficials will keep your garden pest free and the bees will pollinate your veggies.

Add a border of annuals, or put a row of flower like calendula, marigolds, or alyssum between your crops, especially the ones that tend to get buggy, like the brassica family.

Grow perennials that you like in your beds, too, like lilies or roses, anything flowering will attract even more beneficial insects and pollinators.

Interplant tomatoes with basil, parsley, and marigolds. Interplant carrots with onions and calendula, cabbages with sweet alyssum.

Check out the gorgeous art and journaling at Zoe's Garden Prints.

8. Keep notes on what grew well, what did not, if you think something would have done better in a different location, mark that down in your journal. I am a very basic journal-er. I just write down notes to myself but I ooh and aah over the gardeners who make their journals pretty. Something I really want to start doing. Check out Zoe's Garden Prints on insta.

Do not get discouraged if something does not work out. No one ever is 100% successful with everything they plant each year as Mother Nature loves to throw wicked curveballs. Some years have a wet and cool spring so pollination is spotty for less produce or weirdly shaped tomatoes and strawberries. Some year is so hot and dry that plants bolt (go to seed) or just languish in the heat.

I have been growing for 3 decades so like to think I have a pretty good idea of what I am doing by now but still no year is ever perfect. Some years I may only get a few squash on the vines as I get mainly male flowers, or maybe my onions are smaller than usual due to the heat. It is out of my hands, I just keep on growing and tell myself that next year will be better.

Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye. One of my most favourite open-pollinated beefsteak type tomatoes.

Gardener's Motto... there's always next year ; )

Let me know if there is something that need clarifying, more information.

Happy Potager Planning ~ Tanja