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Using garden mapping when planning your garden gives you a visual tool for how much you can produce in your space.
It will help with planning number of seeds you’ll need to buy as well as how many seedlings to start indoors and how to use your space for best growing all season long.
If you’ve started working on your garden plan layout, it’s not unusual to become overwhelmed with all the information you have and how to keep track of it all. That’s where creating a garden map before you begin is so helpful.
A well-planned garden is a place of beauty for growing vegetables and flowers; it’s also an effective and productive space for intensively growing vegetables and herbs and becoming one step closer to sustainability.
This guide will help you delve into the essentials of creating a DIY garden map and create a visual tool that will simplify all the information you need to grow an abundant garden without all the overwhelm.
The best time to start working with mapping is in the winter months when it’s cold outside, and you’re inside surfing through seed catalogs and dreaming of spring.
Contents
What is a Garden Map?
Simply put, garden mapping is a visual design of your garden or space drawn out on paper, or your garden plan layout. Or, if you prefer, it can also be done on a computer using apps or design tools.
By mapping a vegetable garden, you will be able to visualize how to arrange your plantings to spatially organize and plant seeds and seedlings and know where and when you will put all your vegetable plants.
I prefer to use a pen and paper. It might sound a little silly, but since I work on a computer most everyday, I get a little excited to think about pulling out some crayons, a ruler, and some pens, to draw and sketch. It’s honestly relaxing. I also find that carrying my color garden map out to the garden with me is helpful.
Why Use a Garden Map -The Benefits Of One
When planning a garden, all the information you’ll need to know, like seed starting, spacing, planting depths, companion planting, succession planting, vertical growing, etc., gets massively large for any gardener, regardless of skill level.
Therefore, when you make the first step in planning your garden, creating a map, and plotting where you will grow, things will save you time and stress later. It does take some work upfront, but you’ll find it worth it.
Benefits of Using a Garden Map
- ensures the whereabouts of each plant variety and that it has adequate growing space
- helps to ensure that vertical growing plants are in a place that will not hinder optimal sun or shade sun-loving plants such as peppers and tomatoes
- can also help to make sure taller growing plants are in a good location to create shade for plants that may prefer it, such as lettuce
Doing the work and planning upfront on paper will ensure that all your plants can grow to their maximum abilities.
When Planning & Mapping – Consider These
Plant Spacing
How much space does each plant need to grow? You’ll want to refrain from over planting.
If your broccoli needs two-feet spacing, give it the two feet on your map.
Overcrowding or over planting only results in plants competing for space, soil nutrients, and water. Airflow between them will also be restricted which leads to disease and smaller yields.
All plants need space to thrive. Some need wide spacing, such as broccoli and cauliflower, whereas others, like carrots, can be planted more intensively closer together.
Growing Vertically
Do any of your choice plants need to grow vertically, or can they be grown vertically to save valuable space?
When growing vertically, keep in mind how the sun rotates across your garden. Will the trellis shade plants that need full sun? But if you are growing shade-loving plants, you can use the trellis to your advantage by planting them on the north side.
Vegetables, such as cucumbers, can be grown vertically on a trellis, while others, such as pumpkins, will need space for vining out on the ground.
Crop Rotations
You’ll also need to consider crop rotation. If possible, it’s best to keep plant families together so you can easily rotate them year after year.
Each family has its own nutrient and spacing requirements, and planting like families together makes it easier for crop rotation next season. It’s also not recommended to plant like families in the same space for more than one year. Doing so depletes the soil of the same nutrients and can cause stunted growth.
The five most common are:
- Allium Family (Amaryllodaceae – Lilly or Onion): chives, garlic, leeks, onions, shallots
- Brassica Family (Brassicaceae – Brassica or Cabbage ): broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kale, mustard greens, radish, rutabaga, spinach and turnips
- Cucurbitaceae Family (Cucurbitaceae – Squash or Gourd): cucumbers, gourds, melons, pumpkins, and squash
- Legume Family (Fabaceae – Legume or Pea): beans and peas
- Solanaceae Family (Nightshade): tomato, potato, eggplant, peppers,
But I feel like these four should also be mentioned since they contain some common plants home gardeners often grow.
- Apiaceae (Umble Family) – parsley, carrots, fennel, dill, cilantro, celery
- Poaceae (Grass Family) – barley, corn, oats, millet. These are commonly used as cover crops in home gardens.
- Chenopodiaceae (Beet Family) – beetroot, spinach, chard
- Asteraceae (Daisy Family) – artichokes, lettuce, endive, marigolds, sunflowers
So, when doing your plant research, note what family each plant is in so you can plant them all together to make it easier for rotating next season.
Succession Planting
If you are plotting your garden for all seasons and your growing zone is long enough, you may grow in the same space for all seasons – spring, summer, and fall gardening.
For example, here in Tennessee, zone 7b, we start early spring crops, like spinach and lettuce, in late February to early March. But once our warmer weather arrives in April, these cool season crops bolt and turn bitter, so they are done. We pull these out, put them into the compost, or feed them to my cows and/or chickens and plant the next warm season crop in this space.
But it’s not over! Since our first frost doesn’t arrive until mid-late October, when the warm second crops are done, I pull them out, throw spent plants in the compost, and plant cool season crops again. These can be left to grow until around Thanksgiving.
So, I hope you can see succession planting is a great way to take advantage of all your seasons and grow a lot of food if your zone allows.
How to Decide What to Grow
- What do you buy most often from the grocery store regularly?
- What vegetables do you often serve your family?
- Which vegetables will provide you with the highest value? In other words, what costs more to buy at the store?
- What vegetables do you rely on for canning? For example, we use a lot of whole tomatoes and tomato juice for soups, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, etc. So we grow a lot of tomatoes.
- Lastly, what will grow well in your zone? If your family loves okra, but your summers are not hot enough, you will most likely not be able to grow it.
I am often asked these questions, which prompted my book, The Canning Garden Workbook – How to Feed Your Family For a Full Year! I teach you step by step how to answer all these questions.
How to Create a Garden Map for Planning Your Garden
Step One:
The first thing you will need to do before you do anything else is figure out how much space you have.
If you don’t already know, go out into your garden area with a tape measure, pen, and paper and measure each raised bed or garden row you have to figure out how much space you have.
Remember to measure any landscape areas that you can grow as well. Edible landscaping is a great way to take advantage of growing space, especially if your garden space is small.
Step Two:
Once you have written down or sketched out the sizes, the next step is to draw these out on a blank sheet or graph paper. If you can, set a scale for your layout map. For example, 1 inch on your paper can represent 1 foot in your garden.
So if you do raised bed gardening, and each raised bed is 4×8 feet. Then, with a ruler, draw a rectangles on your paper that are 4 inches x 8 inches.
Our previous garden was raised beds, but now on the new farm, we grow in-ground rows. So our space is pretty straight forward. I know that each row is 3 feet wide. I use a free program called Canva for drawing our rows.
Our garden is just over 7,000 square feet in total. I think of it in 3 zones and focus on one zone at a time.
- Zone 1 has 17 rows that are 23 feet long.
- Zone 2 has 14 rows that are 20 feet long.
- Zone 3 has 10 rows that are 25 feet in length.
All the beds are 3 feet wide with 12 inch walking paths made of wood chips between each row.
So, using Canva,I draw long, skinny rectangles for the number of rows I have in each of the three zones and number them. All rows are the same width, but vary in length based on the zone they are in.
Once you have your growing spaced sketched out, I’d recommend making a few copies of it “blank” so you can use them for each season. If you make one in Canva, you can save it to your free plan.
Step Three:
Lastly, armed with your list of vegetables you’ve planned to grow, plot these out on the garden map.
Keep in mind, plant spacing that each plant needs so you can best know how many plants you can grow as well as what can grow vertically and keeping families together.
Remember, don’t be tempted to overcrowd. Your seed packets will give you information such as spacing, planting depth, lighting requirements, and more.
A technique called square-foot gardening is an easy way to simplify your garden design, especially in raised beds or if your growing space is uniquely shaped.
Don’t forget to tuck in some herbs and flowers where you have the extra space. These will attract pollinators to your garden, which will help increase yields.
That’s it! Making a garden map will give you a plan that you can follow each season, year to year.
I’d recommend keeping it in a safe place, such as your garden journal, so you can access it when it’s needed.
Don’t trust your garden space to memory. We are all too busy to keep this kind of stuff in our minds!
Additional Tips for Making A Garden Map
Take an inventory and keep records of the previous season’s harvest. Which vegetables did well, which ones do you need to grow more of.
Make note of what vegetables didn’t grow well. Was the number of growing days enough, or for next time, do they need to be started earlier or do they need to be moved to a better location?
Make creating your garden map fun. Use colored markers, crayons, colored pencils, etc, when designing it. Doing so makes it a lot more fun, and a colorful map of your vegetable garden will brighten the wintertime blues.
More Garden Tips You’ll Like:
- How to Build Raised Beds Insanely Cheap
- How to Start a Garden- 10 Simple Steps for Success
- When to Plant Early Spring Garden
- Spring Garden Checklist – Get Ahead on Spring Chores
- 14 Best – Must Have Garden Tools
