There are several keys or critical tips to growing a good garden. The key for beginning gardeners is to find the critical tips from ‘master’ gardeners. There are plenty of novices like us out there with advice that may of may not be good.
We watch many of the successful YouTube gardeners, take notes and attempt to implement as much as possible. A few of these tips are; Planning, Timing, Logging Progress (and failure), Soil Maintenance, Spacing, Vertical Gardening, Succession Planting, and Compatibility Planting.
While watching a popular Homestead channel we discovered a gardening tool to help plan the timing of our next garden. It’s called “Clyde’s Garden Planner” which is pictured above. We were able to order the planner for $6 online and it was delivered within a few days of placing the order.
As stated in our previous post, we fell victim to the most common new gardener fail: planting too soon…and too late… We put out our tomato plants before the last frost of the season. If we follow the average last frost in the chart above, we run the risk of a repeat performance.
The Spring chart illustrated in our third photo of this post in Clyde’s planner shows an average for several cities in the USA and Canada. Averages are nice, but all of the seasoned gardeners we’ve talked to in Wisconsin tells us not to choose Memorial Day as the definitive last frost date of the year..
However, there were also crops that we planted too late. Like cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, lettuce, spinach and radishes.
So…Memorial Day is the day I set as the last frost for this season and let Clyde help us plan accordingly.
The first photo of this posts is set for a final frost date of May 31. Note that there is a relatively small variety of plants on the planner. However, it covers all of the crops we plan to plant except Pole Beans and Sunflower.
Note too that there are abbreviations. Here’s how to read the planner:
si – Indoor Seeding Dates
LP – last outdoor planting dates
Red Line – Last Spring frost date, First Fall frost date
green check mark – harvest dates
In addition to these planning tools; there are companion plants for each crop listed in blue, spacing recommendation, and sun light needs for each crop.
Clyde’s Garden Planner takes care of timing, succession planting, sunlight needs, spacing and compatible plants. Soil maintenance and vertical gardening will need to be found from other sources.
We think this a great tool to put in our mental gardening tool box!
What’s next? Onions…from seed starting cells to Red Solo Cups!
Ron's Ramblings 