When to Plant How Much of What (a mid-season perspective)

What a great time of year!  There’s so much to harvest in the garden right now, I’m having to decide what not to put in the weekly CSA shares!  This season has already offered so many lessons for the future, and some of these lessons involve how much of what to plant when.

This past winter when I made my planting plan, I really didn’t have anything concrete to base it on.  I estimated the number of CSA members I was hoping to sign up, added some more crops for farmer’s market, and generally planned on planting more than I thought I would need.  Some crops were easier to estimate for than others.  For instance, say I want to have two broccoli heads for each of my 100 shareholders each week, and I’m going to plant broccoli every week.  Each planting would need 200 plants, but I’ll say 300 to be safe and have surplus for market.  I’m planting them intensively at 12” apart, three rows in a bed, so I’ll need to plant one 100’ bed of broccoli each week.  Other crops aren’t so easy to estimate, like summer squash or carrots, so it’s only after this year’s harvests that I have some solid data to base future plantings on.

I’ve also realized that I don’t need to keep planting some of the cool-season crops as regularly through the summer (even though our climate allows it), because in the height of the season I have a big enough variety from the warm-season crops.  This same reasoning also dictates that I need some of my fall plantings to be extra big, because I won’t have the warm-season crops in the mix.

Well ...enough rambling.  Here are some recent crop pics:

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