Garden Planning Guidance

Some Of My Favorite Crop Varieties, Production Methods, and Seed Spacing Considerations

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In my last post I rambled on about why I chose the types of plants that I do for my garden. This post will dive more into the meatier, er veggier, aspects of the mindset behind my homestead agricultural production choices. Before I can do a planning post on potential crop yields and amount of seeds needed to achieve those food goals, I first need to lay out variety selections, preferred production methods, and spacing considerations for my garden. That means I got to make a data table! I love data tables!!

Plants that I sow by the square foot:

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Plant	Variety	Companion Plant	Seeding Density
Tomato	Stupice, Hillbilly, Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, Bonny Best, Taxi (All heirloom seeds), Early Girl and BigBeef are a couple hybrid varieties that I enjoy. I always plant both OP and Hybrid varieties every year for insurance purposes.	I plant my tomatoes in my used greenhouse flooring for weed control and mulch..	I plant four plants to one of my rebar tomato cages, with the cages spaced four feet apart. A more conventional plant spacing would be one indeterminate tomato plant per square foot if trellised.
Cucumber	Straight Eight, Beit Alpha, Diva	Sunflower-I’ve had great success growing cucumbers with my sunflowers. OR: 1 plant per square foot with two feet between rows on my used greenhouse barrier	I plant a cucumber every square foot on the edge of a bed of sunflowers. Aggressive soil feeding will be required, but I have had impressive yields with this method.
Cabbage	Danish Ballhead	I plant spinach in between all of my cabbage plants at a spacing of about 6 inches apart	1 plant every 2 square feet
Pepper	Cayenne Long Slim, Anaheim, Serrano, Ancho, Jalapeno, Pasilla	I always plant my peppers in grids on my used greenhouse flooring. If I didn’t, I would and have surrounded them with radish, basil, lettuce, spinach, and swiss chard for mulch and weed protection	1 plant per square foot.

Plants that I sow by the Row Foot:

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Plant	Variety	Companion Plant	Seeding Density
Corn	I still haven't found my favorite variety yet, anything I plant is under 75 days til harvest. Early Sunglow is a fast maturing corn that I have had luck with, and Golden Bantam is an OP heirloom that matures reasonably fast.	Beans	1 seed every 9-12 inches/3 feet between rows
Potato	Bintje, Belle de Fontenay, German Butterball, Red Pontiac, Yukon Gold	I don’t plant anything with my potatoes as I hill the rows as the plants grow.	12 inches between plants/ 3 feet between rows
Pumpkin	ALL THE KINDS! Some of my favorites: Sugar Pie, Howden, Connecticut Field, Lumina, Rouge Vif D'estampes (Cinderella)	I grow my pumpkins and squash using my used greenhouse flooring, as a mulch and weed barrier. If I were to grow them without such a mulch I would plant a fast growing living mulch that would feed the soil as the plants spread: Red Clover, Buckwheat, and Vetch are green manure mulches that I have utilized, especially between plant rows.	Four feet between hills/I seed 3-4 seeds per hill, thinning to 1 plant per hill,Four feet between rows
Winter Squash	I grow a lot of Butternut, Spaghetti, and Acorn Squash. One of my absolute favorites is a Hubbard/pumpkin cross	Same as pumpkins	Same as pumpkins
Summer Squash	Black Beauty Zucchini!	Same as pumpkins	Same as pumpkins

These two charts are by no means everything that I plant in my garden every year. What I have included is an overview of some of my main crops. The main feature of these charts are varieties that I favor, companion plants if I am utilizing such things, and plant spacing. In my garden I don’t use just one production method. Sometimes I use square foot gardening, sometimes I go for a no-till production method, with other crops I might go old school row planting. My garden planting and production scheme truly depends on my whims.

That said, there are some production methods that I stick to every year. I always raise my squash crops on my used greenhouse flooring, mainly because that stuff is an awesome weed barrier, soil preserver, and overall magnificent mulch. Plus, since it is black, it traps the heat and I need all the help I can get in that department, especially with my squash, heat lovers that they are!

Potatoes are another crop that I grow in rows. I have grown potatoes a million different ways from boxes to washtubs, and I have found that I get the best yield when I grow them in rows that I hill as they grow. Maybe it is an Idaho thing.

All of my leafy greens are grown utilizing the square foot gardening method, and I intercrop them heavily among other crops as a means of weed control. I have the opposite problem of a lot of gardeners, I have a surplus of space, but there is something about the utility and visual beauty of intercropping that appeals to me.

I could blather on and on about how I do things, but I think I will leave my ruminations regarding how I plan and produce my produce at this juncture. This post contained the how and what sections of my planning, so my next gardening post will contain one of the most important bits of knowledge (at least to me) that I have gleaned over the years of gardening trial and error: plant yield. Nothing perplexed me more in the beginning of my gardening adventures than not knowing how much to plant and approximately how much my hard work would yield. Over the years I have gleaned an understanding of just how much produce I can expect during my growing season, and while yield will vary according to each micro-climate and individual gardener’s management level, overall it is super helpful to have at least an inkling of how many carrots you will get in a 10X10 bed or pounds of potatoes per plant. And let’s face it, we gardeners need all the help we can get!

Plant Variety Spotlight:

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Taxi Tomato

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This variety of tomato exemplifies quick to yield. The package says it takes 64 days from transplant to harvest, and I have to say that claim is pretty darn close to accurate. I usually am overloaded with 5-6 ounce globe shaped, yellow tomatoes around day 68-70 from transplant. These little yellow fruits are mild flavored with a lower acid content than some other varieties. I like to throw them in a homemade salsa with some Early Girl tomatoes for a nice, first tomato harvest of the summer bit of enjoyment. This variety of tomato is a determinate and doesn’t seem to be bothered by our chilly North Idaho nights, for it sets plenty of fruit for us to enjoy. I typically grow indeterminate tomatoes on the farm, but this is one of the must have determinate varieties that I don’t skip growing. Taxi seeds are open pollinated and germinate well. I have also saved them and had a lot of success with the saved seeds. This tomato variety is a total stud!

Black Beauty Zucchini

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Zucchini. The plant that yields so much that you have to foist it on others. A plant that I wish all other plants yielded like! I’ve grown a lot of different types of zucchini, but Black Beauty is my absolute favorite variety. There is one main reason behind my affection for this type of zucchini, speed to maturity. Last year I placed seed into the ground and 45 days later I picked and ate my first zuke of the season. You can bet I saved some seeds off of that particular plant, and am hoping to repeat that yield this year, for a LOT of zucchini is consumed in our house.

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And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's mildly irritated at the amount of Markdown used in this post iPhone.

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