Market garden planner pro#

What this crop planner cannot do for you is create a crop sequence for each bed or field block, or let you know if you have planned more than the space you have available.

It then generates an annual gross income projection (by crop) a greenhouse schedule, direct seeding schedule and a seed ordering checklist. The template I have here starts with the harvest date and works back from there. Since crop planning on a market farm can be a mind-boggler, I thought I would share my template for planning out a schedule.

Market garden planner pro#

Once you are a honed in pro you’ll have your plan dialed in and you’ll be able to relax on your record keeping to some degree. It will customize your crop plan to your climate, soils, and management style over the years. When do you actually seed the 25th succession of salad mix? When did you actually plant it in the field? What seeding rate did you end up using? When was it actually at perfect marketable size? This data is helpful to collect along the way for each planting. Keeping track of your ‘Real Life Actuals’ is important. If you are a paper copy kind of person, that’s OK too. If you manage to keep your hands clean while you are on the farm, you might choose to use your phone, and make entries directly into the planner as you seed your way through the year. I find that it endures the wild life of being on a farm, and being handled in the field with dirty hands a lot better that way. My crop plan usually has additional seedings added on the fly penciled in, and notes about failures, or circumstances that are important factors to consider when looking back in the winter when the season behind you is a blur.Įach season I print out the crop plan on heavy cardstock paper. Its a guide that you can follow, but you can also adapt it. Sometimes those experiments become innovations! A plan on paperĪ crop plan, created in the winter, printed in the spring, and followed closely all season is a great tool. Definitely bank on what date you KNOW work well, and take a risk here and there for the sake of experimentation. Testing the limits of the season is important, since our climate is always different you might be glad you seeded 2 weeks earlier this year and got the first peas to the market, but if winter lingers on and delays spring planting, hopefully there wasn’t too much of a financial or labor investment riding on that ‘Maybe’.

Its important to note that seed companies will indicate whether their DTM is ‘from transplant’ or ‘from seeding date’ and will affect how you enter that data. However, if you are just starting out, using the Days to Maturity (DTM) and Days in Greenhouse provided by the seed company create a good foundation of data to start with. The real finesse of a crop plan comes from averaging your 'Real Life Actuals’ from each season behind you. Make sure you base this on information from a trusted source so that you aren’t disappointed when your real life actuals are a mile off-target (and know, that it farming is variable enough that it happens to all of us!). Whenever you lack in experience, you’ll need to make up a number. It’s useful to have your pricing determined and market tested as well, prior to crop planning too. Throughout the season I may have trialed a few different growing methods (for instance adding a 4th row of carrots to a bed, or trialing different seeding rates) and the results of those trials will be reflected in the decisions made during crop planning too. Good inputs = good outputsīefore I create a crop plan, I sift through my harvest records to come up with realistic yield totals for each crop, or even each variety (where that is relevant). But if you don’t have a crop plan, or any data on hand it can be a HEADACHE to create all this from scratch and hope your guesses are correct. At the end of every season, I get giddy with excitement to look back over a season’s worth of data and use it to create a new plan for the clean-slate-of-a-season ahead.