There's no time like the present for planning your garden!  Jami Scholl, an edible landscaping and garden designer from My Edible Eden, LLC, gave us the following suggestions:

Start by deciding what you want to grow... and eat!

• Have everyone in your family make a list of their favorite foods.
  
• Also have them list foods they dislike so you can avoid wasting garden space.
• Remove any crops that won't grow in your climate.
  

Once you know what to you want to plant, it is time to create a planting chart of when and how to plant.

• Make or buy a planting chart that suits you (like the one offered by My Edible Eden).
• List each plant you want to grow.
• Estimate how much your family will eat of each crop, each season (including any extras to preserve for the winter).
• Make a note for the plant's sun needs (high, medium, low) and its temperature needs (cold-weather or warm-weather).
• Research the lifecycle of each plant.  Some plants take a long time to develop and therefore have a narrow planting window (e.g. tomatoes), while others mature quickly and thus can be replanted in multiple batches (e.g. beans), a technique called succession planting.
• Also research the spacing needs of each plant to understand how much room they will need in the garden.

With chart in hand it is time to map the garden, both on paper and physically.

• Stake out and measure the garden area.
• Sketch your garden onto graph paper, noting the areas with more and less sun.
• Sketch in your desired food plants at the right spacing. 
• If everything fits, wonderful! If not, consider finding additional garden space or growing some crops vertically to preserve space (like cucumbers or pipe pumpkins).
• Now you're ready to plant!
  

 This guide was adapted from a longer article written by Jami Scholl; to get the whole story, click

"To Plan and Map Your Garden" and read it on our blog.

Why Map and Plan?

Gardens are incredibly complex and thus it is nearly impossible to hold all the information in our heads.  A good garden plan makes it easy to jump in and start planting while also building up knowledge for the next year.  Planning your garden combined with taking notes during the growing season will lead to more successful gardens in the future by developing a strategy perfectly unique for your garden.