I don’t give you a ton of helpful advice in Growing Mondays, because the more I grow the less I know. Also, the more I grow the more hands-off I get, except for some key moments I’ve decided are important: composting, planting, planting again, planting again, harvesting, walking around aimlessly deciding what to eat, and so on.

But, planning out your garden is kindof important. Only kindof, because things never go to plan. Important, because deciding what you want is the whole point. If you can decide what you want, usually you’re more likely to get it. Unless you decide you want to grow, say, cherries in Cape Town, or Jackfruit in Boston.

1) Plan for the amount of growing space you actually have, and for growing to be much slower than the seed packet says.

2) If you’ve composted well, you can usually space a little closer than common advice says, but don’t completely ignore all spacing conventions. Doing so will ultimately be depressing, because light, water and nutrient requirements will eventually catch up with you. The exception to this is radishes, carrots, and beetroot, which you can pretty much put as close together as you like.

3) Take a sober look at past seasons. Did you get a good yield, however subjective, from your growing space? If not, do you know why not? From this process of looking at previous seasons, I’ve transitioned more beds to lower-management, such as carrots, beetroots, swisschard, or sweet potato. I’ve also transitioned some beds to shade-tolerant perennials— blackberries and raspberries— to make sure the beds I actively manage match the amount of attention and time available. Most problems are ultimately problems of attention rather than problems related to knowledge. If you have enough attention, you can google problems, ask more experienced gardeners, and usually find some solutions.

Decide what you care about: greens, ease, freshness, heirloom/rareness, etc. Look at sunlight in the coming season. Imagine a growing bed in all its glory. Break it down into the smallest steps possible, and decide what you’ll plant and when, bed by bed. I don’t mean when just in terms of sun and weather conditions, I mean when in your actual day. The more detail you can envision, the better.

4) Match the level of complexity to your actual life. You can plant approximately 12895875094857 seeds in a day, but you can only care for a much smaller number of trays. Only plant like, double, what you can actually care for.

5) Take a careful look at your personality and growing style- it changes every season! Do you love growing interesting, exciting heirlooms? If you do, do you actually grow them or just like the idea of them? Are you boring but stable? Divide your efforts accordingly, and be a little self-critical. For example, I am 94% extremely boring, 6% exciting, so I primarily grow food to eat, and then also a few ridiculous things, because I could stand to be a little more exciting. If you are exciting, don’t be so exciting that you forget about eating. Because ultimately it’s exciting to eat, even if it’s something really basic.

6) If you’re growing more beds than you can plant seeds for, plan fewer beds, plan to buy seedlings, or plan out perennials. Don’t leave space empty. It’s easy to throw seeds down for a cover crop.

Next week, I’ll share some more planning ideas, and we’ll get more into specific crops.

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