How to Stick to Your Garden Plan

You’ve taken the time to lay out a great garden plan. You know what you’re going to plant, where, and when. You’ve even planned out when you’ll need to transplant and the date you can expect your first harvest. Everything is going great in your garden. But then something happens. Maybe the weather takes an unexpected turn. Or your garden gets attacked by a pest or disease. Perhaps something in your life changes and you can’t spend the time in your garden that you had planned. What do you do? Throw out your plan and start over? Don’t ditch your plan yet, there are many ways to recover your plan. Let’s talk about how to stick to your garden plan.

Benefits of Good Planning

Having a garden plan greatly increases the chances of reaching your garden goals each year. Taking the time to sit down and plan out how much of each crop you want to grow sets up a lot of the rest of your plan. It dictates how many supplies you need. Choosing the crops in advance gives you the time to research when and how you need to plant and transplant. You also can figure out how much space you need to prepare. It even allows you to set up a garden schedule with planting, weeding, watering, and eventually harvesting. You could even figure out how many canning jars or other preservation supplies to collect.

A good plan is worth it’s weight in gold. Depending on your planning style, it could be a binder full of paper garden maps, lists of seeds and crops, a written calendar and a daily or weekly schedule. Or you could go fully electronic with satelite or drone photos of your land, spreadsheets, and electronic calendars with all the remiders and prompts they come with. Maybe you prefer a hybrid approach with some physical documents to take out to the garden with you, but more detailed data captured electronically. Choose what works for you. But whatever format you choose, you also need to plan for a way to stick to your garden plan when conditions change.

Incorporating Flexibility

The best garden plan has a certain amount of flexibility built right into it. If you start out your planning incorporating extra materials and extra time in case something goes wrong, you won’t have to change much when it does. I like to plant at least 10% more seeds than the number of plants I think I will need to account for low germination, seedling losses, and transplant shock. I also like to give myself a few extra days or weeks in my schedule in case something comes up on a big garden work day. Incorporating flexibility from the beginning starts you off with a bit of a cushion to allow you to handle minor mishaps.

You can also build flexibility into your garden plan by making substitutions if needed. Say you lose a bunch of seedlings at a critical time. You could replant seeds and delay your plan by a few weeks, or you could substitute with seedlings of roughly the same age and size from a garden store or the farmers market. It may impact your garden budget, but it can save you lots of time and allow you to stick to your plan and still make your harvest on time. Figuring out different varieties, different growing methods, or even different timeframes can help you work through a challenge and stay on track.

Knowing When to Pivot

Sometimes no amount of flexibility or substitution is going to help. If you have a major mishap, like a freak hailstorm that flattens your garden a few weeks before harvest, you may need to pivot. This doesn’t mean give up on your garden goals completely, but pivot to a new, more achievable goal. You could focus on salvaging what harvest you can. Also, you can be incorporating all those valuable nutrients into your soil while you are ramping up your fall and winter garden to make up some lost production. You could even expand your season extending structures to keep growing.

You also might need to pivot in what you gain from a particular garden season. Maybe you lose a big portion of your plants to pests or disease. You might not be able to salvage that crop, but you could find a way to prevent the problem or protect your plants in the future. That learning may be more valuable to your future garden than the harvest you lost. As frustrating as it is to lose plants, you almost always learn something from everything that happens in your garden. Focusing on capturing that knowledge and using it in the future can help you stick to your garden plan for years to come.

Consistency is Key

Sometimes mother nature is not the force upending your garden plan. It’s the gardener. Things out of your control, like the economy, your family life, or your work schedule can make your plan obsolete. Or you can just get distracted, focus on other things, or procrastinate on garden projects. It’s easy to get behind and then feel like the whole plan is ruined. But don’t let falling behind a little snowball into a huge problem. Find one thing to start and then keep doing the next thing until you’re back on track.

Consistency in following your garden plan is key to keeping it alive and well. Find a time in your schedule when you can check your plan and incorporate it into your day or week. Do you have a few minutes on a Sunday night or a Monday morning when you can do some planning? Pencil in key tasks like planting, weeding, and watering to your daily routine. Maybe it’s a 15 minute garden slot at the same time each day. Or you form a habit that every time you go to the kitchen for a snack, you walk by the garden area and do a 5 minute garden task. Making gardening part of your routine will help you stick to your garden plan and enjoy a successful growing season every year.

Looking for the motivation to keep going when nature does a number on your garden plan? You need a way to define victory that is both inspiring and achievable, no matter what. Check out my blog post on Planning for Garden Victory for more details. Enjoy!

Need a fool-proof way to set up your garden plan? Check out my Garden Planning Masterclass and get an actionable garden plan done today!