Scheduling the Unschedulable - Annual Vegetable Crop Planning 101
- Medick Rottenbiller
- Dec 27, 2022
- 4 min read
Hello my fellow jaded plant people,
Today I am going to try to make as short and concise a post as possible on crop planning. To avoid rambling on and on, I'll just say this about what I've learned crop planning over the past 8 winters: every single farm and every single crop is unique, just because you can plan crops, doesn't mean you can grow, care for, harvest, sell/use them, and crop planning is dependent on both accounting for the weather and assuming that weather can not be accounted for. In other words, the perfect crop plan does not exist. So without further ado, here is how I go about scheduling my vegetables...
Determining what to grow, like most things in life, should rest somewhere between reality and fantasy, somewhere between what you should grow and what you want to grow for your given growing space. Too many individual factors make for too many scenarios to make this a black and white choice. But for the sake of making this long story slightly less long, I'm not going to discuss the infinite nuances of what you should grow for any given potential space type, and assume you have a regular ole field of regular ole soil.
For me, there are basically 4 kinds of vegetable crops(planning-wise): spring, summer, fall, and winter. And the planning of all of these crops begins with the "frost schedule". Spring crops, which can handle some frost, are planted a certain number of weeks before the last expected frost of spring. The idea here to have crops growing in the field as early as possible without risking their destruction from the really hard frosts of winter. Summer crops, which can't handle any frost, or in some cases even temperatures below 40, can't be planted until after the last frost of spring has passed. Fall crops, usually similar to spring crops, can't handle the heat of summer, or the cold of winter, and are planned according to the first expected frost of winter, so that they are ready for harvest before winter kicks in fully. Finally there are winter crops, which can also be planted by the first expected frost date, but are often scheduled by your location's "persephone period".
For more on the mythology behind this name, check out our youtube video "Persephone and the Pomegranate". The persephone period tells us the date when our location gets less than 12 hours of sunlight per day. The idea is that, with winter crops, we want to plant the vegetables early enough that they get established, but late enough that they don't get so mature, that they won't overwinter. Most vegetables will enter a sort of dormant growth state when they receive less than 12 hours of daylight, and so we can time our winter crops by the size we want them to be and the size they are expected to be by planting them a specific number of weeks before the persephone period.
So once we have our frost schedule, and persephone period, we can basically make a list of the vegetables we want to grow, categorize them by their temperature tolerances, and then schedule their planting by our expected frost schedule which can be looked up on a plethora of websites. The caveat here, is that not all varieties of the same vegetable have the same growth period, or even temperature tolerances, and individualized timings should be used for such crops, which brings us to another consideration; variety selection.
Some vegetables, can't necessarily be categorized as either a spring, summer, fall, or winter crop. Lettuce is a good example of this. Yes, lettuce prefers the cool temperatures of spring and fall, but can be grown in the heat of summer also. You just have to plant heat tolerant varieties. Some varieties of cabbage grow in 50 days, but can't store, while others might take 120 but last for 6 months in the root cellar. In these cases, I find it better to plan by individual variety, instead of just saying "lettuce" or "cabbage". In general, in spring, I want the fastest possible variety, so that I can use the space for a second or even third crop, and in Fall I'm looking for varieties that keep well in the field and store well post harvest.
Ok, so now that we have an idea of when we are planting our vegetables in the field, we can determine the transplant schedule. Without babbling too much about transplanting and why you should grow your own transplants here, it's important for the novice to understand that some vegetables basically have to be transplanted to be grown successfully. Some vegetables, like tomatoes or peppers, take so long to produce fruit, that if you direct seeded them in your garden, and you live anywhere with a real winter, by the time they're ready to produce fruit, the first frost of winter, and the crops demise, will be quickly approaching. Each crop has its own transplant period, which is usually given in number of weeks to start the transplants before our frost dates.
Determine which crops you need/want to transplant, determine their transplant period, subtract that from the plant date, which is determined by our frost schedule, and voila, you now have a transplanting schedule, and more or less a complete vegetable calendar. Now it's time to deal with our physical space, and a crop rotation which we will discuss in the next post. Below is a list of links you might find helpful in determining your crop schedule.
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