Having a plan either in life or in the garden makes things easier. It gets you from point a to point b or point z much easier. It can also minimize surprises, like planting 10 zucchini plants and almost filling your bathroom with zucchinis (for my market garden I only plant 10-15 plants and it’s plenty for my markets). So what should you consider when making a garden?

1. Where are you going to plant? Containers, raised beds, or in the ground.
2. Soil. I will go into more detail on the 3 ways of gardening and will go into more detail on what soils to use for each method. Healthy soil is vital to having a thriving garden and the right kind of soil makes things so much easier.
3. How many people are you going to feed? What are you going to do with the produce? Can it, eat it fresh, store it, donate some to a food bank, dehydrate it…………. If you want tomatoes for just fresh eating and not canning you will plant to less tomatoes than if you were going to can. Also their are different types of tomatoes: cherries, romas, heirlooms, and slicers. Each is a different size and serves a different use (cherry tomatoes aren’t good for tomato sandwiches or canning, roma tomatoes don’t make the best tomato sandwiches, etc.) The other thing to consider is how much does veggie plant produce or for root veggies how many feet do you need.
4. How tall does each plant get? This is more important when doing raised or in the ground gardening. Doing a row of sunflowers, than beets, and than indeterminant tomatoes will mean the beets might get too much shade and not get full size. Also by arranging things according to height makes for a prettier garden.
5. How much light does the space you want garden get? Vegetables need to get full sun to produce at their maximum. I have successfully grown vegetables on a balcony that only got sun from the east. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. If you think your yard is too shaded or your balcony doesn’t get enough sun experiment and see what works. As long as you get some sun, you may get a harvest. Now of course full sun is ideal.