From there, “reverse-engineer,” or back-calculate, to determine how many plants you will need to produce that quantity.Among the sagest bits of planning advice for gardeners - no matter the scale at which they grow - comes from retired engineer and efficiency expert Mel Bartholemew in his classic book, Square Foot Gardening, to “picture the harvest before you plant.” Figure out how much yield you want to produce for each crop, based on your market expectations and past experience.The following are basic steps and considerations that can guide your planning. Calculators & charts for approximating your yield and seed amounts The overall goal of your design is to gain efficiency, reducing work and waste, while providing the best possible growing conditions for each crop.
So choose whatever units or subunits you find most useful. If you only plant one row per bed, the row feet is equal to the bed feet.īreaking any large goal down into smaller units of measurement in time and space is the art and science of project management, and it’s what enables us to make a start. When we refer to row feet, we mean the total length of all your rows of a particular crop. This graphic shows the difference between bed feet and row feet.įor the purposes of this article and the relevant charts and calculators, we use row feet, together with row feet per acre, to enable most growers to extrapolate how much seed or how many seedlings they’ll need to achieve their end goal. Others prefer to use the row foot (plural row feet) or, for those using metric units, row meter(s). Major management units can thus be further divided up, into rows or beds or even square feet, as in the backyard garden, to reflect the area where the plants are being grown and maintained.Īs subunits, many growers favour the linear bedfoot, which is a 1-foot slice across a planting bed, as a unit of calculation. When it comes to management, the “per acre” expression in the context of how much surface area is directly involved in crop growing can lead to some confusion. In a garden, each bed might be considered its own unit. On a smaller farm, it could be a block of beds. A management unit on a medium-sized farm might also be an entire field. The acre is a traditional major management unit that can be used, depending upon the scale or your farm and its layout. Experienced growers find it helpful to divide their market gardens or farms into management units as a way of reducing the complexity.
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