How I plan my garden: part 1 assessing the past year

One of the best things about gardening is variety and diversity.  Every garden has it's own soil, light, climate, microclimate, and variety and layout of plants.  Even my next door neighbor won't have exactly the same conditions as me.  My goal with this series is not to dictate to you, dear reader, the ONLY WAY TO GARDEN but to share my experience and point to strategies that I hope can apply widely.  Take from this what is useful, leave behind what isn't.  Combine it with all the other useful information, experience, and advice you find, and create your own garden.

Context--I garden in the northern hemisphere--Western New York State, not far from either Lake Erie or Lake Ontario.  I'm in a small town in a fairly open space.  Growing zone 5b, lattitude about 43*North, frost free from mid May to mid October.  Summer highs in low 90s.  Winter lows can get below 0*F, but don't stay there.  Teens and 20s is more usual.

Take notes  I have established gardens--a vegetable garden and several perennial beds.  Planning any year's garden starts with a full assessment of the previous year.  I take notes throughout the gardening year of anything I think I will want to know later.  Planting times and weather conditions, harvests, what got eaten or died--it's all useful.  Lots of people make spreadsheets or use journal apps.  I tried, but have discovered that a notebook is what's right for me.  I leave space around entries so I can go back and add relevant notes, like the one here.  The original entry is seeds that I started indoors.  I later added the note "6 weeks--good!" i.e. that they were exactly right to plant out six weeks later.

Assess the previous year  In late summer/early fall I walk through all of my gardens and write a detailed summation of how everything did, what kind of harvest I got, etc.  If I worked from memory I would probably remember all of the failures and half of the successes.  By physically walking the property and writing about every bed, I better capture the full story.  This is the time of year that most of the vegetable garden is either in full production or has just finished, so I can capture in the present tense what I wish I had harvested more of and what looks like it struggled due to lack of sun, too much water, too little, etc. I can also note what did really well.  This is the starting point for planning next year's garden.  I can plan to move the plants that need more sun, grow twice as much of the vegetable that was a big hit, eliminate the one that didn't produce enough to justify the space it took up, or try a new variety that might taste better, produce more, produce sooner, etc.

Measure garden beds  If I have built any new beds, fall is a great time to measure them, so that by the time the snow falls I can do my planning in the warmth of the house.  The vegetable beds are rectangles and seed packets specify spacing, so it's an easy bit of multiplication to figure out how much space x number of seedlings will need.  If that amount of math makes you sweat, or you are not working in rectangles, let me suggest my method for planning irregularly shaped beds.  I get the spacing for the desired plant from the seed packet, plant label, or catalogue description and put a marker--I like used takeout chopsticks--each place I want a plant based on that spacing.  When I'm done I count the markers, and I can leave them in place until planting time.  

I love using these wooden carpenter's rulers in the garden.  No danger of them snapping back like a carpenter's tape measure, and they are hinged every six inches.  6, 12, and 18 inches are incredibly common plants spacings, so it's almost more counting than measuring....

Draw the beds  Then I make a drawing of next year's garden with all of those adjustments included.  I rotate my garden beds, meaning that I don't grow the same thing in the same place each year.  Long ago I established an order for how the 5 beds rotate, so this drawing will be of those new positions, too.  i.e. If tomatoes were in bed 1, next year they will be in 3.

Why? My winter is dark and snowy, so getting all of this info in fall when it's still pleasant outside, means I can change the plan as many times as I want in front of a warm fire.  Seed companies have a fresh batch of seeds by the first day of winter, and this is the information I need to know how many seeds to buy, or how many plants to order.