Planning a garden involves deciding what crops to plant, how to efficiently use your space, and correctly timing the planting, care, and harvest of each crop. Whether you are planning a large backyard garden, a small community garden plot, or a container garden, these smart space ideas, tips, and strategies will get your planting efforts off on the right foot.

Where to Start

As it does with most endeavors, it pays to think through your garden project before you gather your seeds or transplants. The last thing you want is to have your garden feel like a chore rather than a source of inspiration and relaxation. Answering these following questions will help you develop a garden plan that suits your space and lifestyle.

Choose a Location

When choosing a location for your garden, consider light, water access, and soil.

1. Sunlight

Does your garden location get enough sunlight? Most vegetables grow best when they get at least six hours of sun a day, so be sure to plant your garden in a sunlight-rich location.

2. Water Access

Does your garden have easy access to water? Sowing your seeds or planting your transplants near a water source will make it easier for you to keep your soil at the optimal moisture level.

3. Soil Health

Does your garden have healthy soil? There’s no way to overemphasize the importance of good soil: your garden will grow best in nutrient-rich, well-drained, weeded, and loosened (non-compacted) soil.

Before you plant each spring, take the time to enrich your soil with quality compost or other organic matter if you want to boost your soil’s fertility and your garden’s production. Mulch (like leaves, straw, and hay) also adds valuable nutrients to the soil and will cut down significantly on your need to weed. 

Learn more about soil health.

Think About Your Space

Consider these factors before choosing the crops and varieties you want to grow.

1. Garden size

How much space can you commit to a garden? Maybe you have a large, dedicated garden space in your backyard. Maybe you have a couple of raised beds. Maybe you only have space for a couple of containers. Take into account the size of your garden (including space between rows), the amount of sunlight it gets, and its access to water.

2. Time

Think about your schedule and ability. How much time and energy do you have to devote to weeding, mulching, watering, and other garden maintenance? 

Bigger doesn’t always mean better when it comes to basic garden planning. If you’re new to gardening, or if you have limited time to devote to your garden, commit to a plot size that won’t overwhelm you, and concentrate on a selection of vegetables you like to eat that are also easy to grow. Radishes, lettuce, spinach, and carrots are just a few of the crops that don’t take a lot of time or experience to produce a harvest.

Get to Know Your Region

As you think about your garden this year, take some time to learn a little about the climate in your region.

1. Know your region’s first and last frost dates

Your region’s first and last frost dates are the key to successful garden planning. These dates are especially helpful when growing and saving seeds from annuals.

Use your last frost date to determine when to start seeds and plant out transplants. For example, here at Heritage Farm in northeast Iowa, our last spring frost is typically around May 3. Since it’s best to start tomato seeds indoors 4-6 weeks before transplanting out, we know to start the seeds 4-6 weeks before our last frost date.

Use your first frost date to determine the length of your growing season and which crops will have the time necessary to fully mature in your region.

Find your region’s frost dates here.

2. Know your region’s plant hardiness zone

Which plant hardiness zone are you growing in? The USDA’s Plant Hardiness Zone Map divides the United States into zones according to the “average annual extreme minimal temperature.” Knowing your plant hardiness zone will help you choose crops that will thrive in your location.

Your plant hardiness zone is especially helpful if you are growing perennials. If a particular crop type is “hardy to zone _,” then it can overwinter year-round in regions in that growing zone. For example, chives are hardy to zone 3 and are perennial for growing zones 3-9.

Knowing your hardiness zone is also helpful when saving seeds from biennials. In colder zones, the winters might be too frigid to successfully overwinter biennials outdoors.

Find your plant hardiness zone here.

Choosing Crops and Varieties

After observing your garden space, your time and energy, and your region’s frost dates, it’s time to start choosing which varieties you’re going to grow!

What piques your interest?

What interests you the most? It could be crops that you like to eat, flowers that beautify your garden beds, or heirloom varieties with inspirational stewardship histories. Browse through our seed catalog or the Exchange—our gardener-to-gardener seed swap—for inspiration!

Think about your goals

What do you hope to accomplish this year? Maybe your goal is to grow more of your own food, or to share it with your community. Maybe you want to improve the landscape aesthetics or attract beneficial pollinators. Maybe you want to challenge yourself by growing a new crop or saving your own seeds. Choose crops that align with your goals.

Choose your crops wisely

Choose crops that fit your space. If you have limited garden real estate, choose varieties that take up less space and that are well-suited for containers. If you are new to gardening, choose crops that are beginner-friendly, such as radishes and lettuce.

Create a Plan

After thinking about which crops and varieties you want to grow, it’s time to leap into action! Here are some things you can do to get ahead before you start planting in the spring:

Map your garden

Creating a map of your garden can be a fun and useful exercise! Draw an aerial view of your garden, and be sure to include the specific measurements of the space, as well as the location of existing landscaping, such as trees and perennials. Once you have your map drawn, start penciling in your chosen varieties!

Tip: If you had a garden last year, consider rotating your crops this year, moving the location of each plant family to increase soil fertility and crop yield. 

Sort your varieties

Get organized by sorting your varieties! There’s no correct way to do this; just do what works best for you and your space. Here are a few ideas:

• Sort by location—Example: group together varieties by garden bed.
• Sort by sowing type—Example: separate varieties by where you will start the seeds; indoors as transplants vs direct-sowing into your garden.
• Sort by timing—Example: organize varieties by the month, week, or even date you plan to start them.

Create a planting schedule

Use your last frost date to determine exactly when to start each crop type and organize this information into a schedule you can follow in the spring. To know when to start each crop, refer to the instructions on the back of your seed packet or check out our crop-by-crop growing guides.

Tip: Spreadsheets and physical calendars are both great ways to organize this information into an actionable plan!

Keep Your Tools Simple

As you plan your garden, take inventory of your seed starting and gardening supplies.

You don’t need to invest a lot in tools for weeding and breaking up soil or otherwise preparing your soil for seeds or transplants. Multipurpose tools like this weeder and cultivator, used at Seed Savers Exchange’s Heritage Farm, can help you keep your garden weed-free.

Browse more recommended gardening tools here.

Garden Planning for Seed Saving

If you are planning to save seeds this year, you will need to factor in some additional considerations, such as each crop’s lifecycle—like annual vs biennial—required isolation distance, and pollination method.

Seed gardening can be done according to your ability and interest level. Starting small when growing a variety for seed will help ensure success. By growing familiar varieties, you’ll easily be able to tell if the seed is true to type when you grow it the following year. 

Know Your Region

Each region has its benefits and challenges, and understanding which ones you face is crucial for gardening success.

1. Research what species and varieties grow well as food crops in your area.

2. Use your region’s frost dates to determine the length of your season. Use this information to determine what can be grown for seed. Be sure to note when the seeds reach harvest maturity.

Remember: For some plants, harvest maturity (when seeds are mature) is different from market maturity (when the crop is ready for consumption). These plants need a longer growing season for seed hvarvest than for food harvest.

3. Use your plant hardiness zone to determine which perennial and biennial crops can survive the winter in your region. If you live in an area with very cold winters but want to grow biennials for seed, make sure you have a space—such as a root cellar—where biennial plants can overwinter without freezing.

Selecting Crops

Take a look at this Seed Saving Guide for an overview of each crop’s life cycle, pollination method, and isolation distance requirements.

1. Plant life cycle

If you are new to saving seeds, start with annuals that are primarily self-pollinating as starter seed crops. Biennials and those with larger isolation distance requirements take more planning and care than self-pollinating annuals. For this reason, open-pollinated varieties of lettuce, peas, and beans are ideal choices for anyone new to seed saving.

Peas and beans have another advantage in that they take up the same space in the garden when being grown for seed as they do when being grown for eating, making it simpler for a new seed saver to plan out a garden without having to reconsider spacing considerations.

Endive, which requires a little more space when grown for seed, can still be grown at its regular spacing and simply be thinned to desired spacing for seed maturation. The plants in between can be harvested as the season progresses, making room for the selected seed plants to fill out and flower.

2. Plant pollination method

If you are new to saving seeds or have limited garden space, start with self-pollinating crops. Vegetables with perfect flowers—flowers that have both pollen-producing/male and pollen receiving/female parts—such as tomatoes, can be successfully grown for seed by bagging individual flowers and collecting seeds from these fruits, or by meeting the modest recommended isolation distance between varieties when growing more than one cultivar.

Cucumbers, okra, and melons can also be good crops for beginner seed savers as long as nearby neighbors are not growing a different variety of them. Although these three crops are insect-pollinated and outcross to varying degrees, planting only one variety allows for the production of true-to-type seeds when adequately isolated from other gardens.

More adventurous beginners may wish to try hand pollinating a squash or pumpkin variety, and in areas where the climate allows for in-ground vernalization, they may even attempt to grow leeks, beets or collards and collect their seeds in the second season.

3. Know the Seed’s Characteristics

Heirloom, open-pollinated seeds are a perfect place for the beginning seed saver to start.

While seeds produced by a hybrid, or F1, variety are occasionally grown out by breeders and advanced seed savers in an effort to stabilize the traits of the variety, such seeds are highly unlikely to develop into plants that closely resemble the parent plant.

Open-pollinated varieties, on the other hand, will produce seeds that are true to type and maintain the desired characteristics of their variety, as long as the seed saver takes care to prevent unwanted cross-pollination between cultivars.

Whether you decide to take on more complex seed crops over time or to simply collect seeds from easy-to-manage crop varieties is a matter of choice. And whether you collect seeds from many varieties of vegetables or only a select few, there is a growing satisfaction that comes along with being an active member of the seed-saving community.

Learn more about saving seeds

Garden Planning for Seed Saving (video)

Jeanine Scheffert, former SSE education and engagement manager, shares her process of planning her home garden and how she plans for seed saving.