Planning

A little while ago, Drew and I were on tap for a 4-H fundraiser – our son Dave had organized it but was working at the hardware store all day, so we volunteered to go and set up the stuff for him and watch out for any trouble the volunteers running the booth might run into.  Bottom line:  we were committed to be hanging around a suburban strip mall for hours with nothing much to do.

I’m much better with being underutilized than Drew.  Sitting around being less than optimally productive really drives him crazy.  Therefore, we decided we would stake out the mall’s Starbucks and spend the time planning farming activities while keeping an eye on the fundraiser through the window.  Great idea!

Drew brought all the right source documents, and I spent a couple of very focused hours working from the list of our desired companion crops that I’d put together two weekends ago, the ballpark desired planting windows for each of the crops that I’d gotten from local gardening expert Farmer Fred and other internet sources, and the days to harvest that I’d also spent time researching.  Taking these source documents, what I wanted to come away with was a week-by-week plan of action.  Since most of our available time is on the weekends, I defined a week as starting on Saturday and ending on Friday.  I wanted my new document to be able to tell me, at a single glance, for example, on the week starting Saturday, August 15, 2009, what we’d be planting, what we’d be harvesting, and what infrastructure building or maintenance we’d need to be doing.

I was able to build the kind of schedule I’d envisioned, but it ended up very crowded.  As I showed it to Drew, I could see it was too much information to be meaningful at a glance, so I decided to break it out further into two additional schedules:  a “Planting Plan” and a “Harvest Plan.”

The results are very useful.  Given the crops we’ve chosen to grow, and the growing seasons we can use for each of the crops in our climate zone, and the days to harvest for each crop, and the greenhouse requirements for a couple of them, and by planning successive plantings as needed, I’ve been able to a “Harvest Plan” that has vegetables coming into eatable stage almost every week of the year.  The only thin time is August.

It’s just a thumbnail.  We’ll learn how things really work, how many days each kind of plant really takes to harvest, and how successful we really are at following our planting plan.  We’ll record the actual plantings and harvests against our documented plans.  This stuff is so perfect for a Virgo business analyst!

Dan

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