Human SkillsA Twelve Month Plan
Build a sowing calendar that fits your own climate
6 minAdvancedUpdated
- Build a month by month sowing calendar from your frost dates
- Plan succession so beds are never empty or all ready at once
- Estimate how much of each crop a household actually eats
Start from what you eat
Most beginner plots fail because they grow what the seed rack offered. Write down the ten vegetables your household actually eats in a normal week, then cut the list to six for the first year. Rough annual figures per adult: 25 to 40 kilos of potatoes, 8 to 10 kilos of onions, 10 kilos of carrots, 12 to 20 kilos of tomatoes if you make sauce, 40 to 60 lettuces if you eat salad most days, 8 to 12 winter brassica plants. Two courgette plants feed a family and four will bury them. Planning quantities honestly is what turns a garden from a hobby into food.
Anchor the calendar on two dates
Draw twelve columns and mark your last and first frost dates. Now place each crop by counting in weeks, not by copying a magazine. Tender crops: sow indoors six to ten weeks before last frost, plant out two to three weeks after it. Hardy spring crops: sow as soon as soil reaches 7 degrees Celsius. Winter brassicas and leeks: sow 14 to 20 weeks before first frost. Garlic and overwintering onions: plant in the two months before first frost. Roots and salads: a short row every two to three weeks, stopping about ten weeks before first frost. This one page works in either hemisphere.
Succession and follow-on crops
A bed should rarely be bare. Plan what follows what before the season starts: broad beans out in June, brassicas in; early potatoes lifted in June, leeks in; garlic lifted in June, a late courgette or bush beans in; summer salad finished, autumn spinach in. Keep a tray of module-grown transplants ready so a bed is refilled the same day it is cleared, which is the single biggest yield gain available to a small plot. When there is no follow-on crop, sow a green manure such as field beans, phacelia or rye rather than leaving soil bare to weeds and rain.
The hungry gap and the dead months
Every climate has a stretch where the stores are finished and the new crops are not ready. In temperate gardens that is March to May. Fill it with purple sprouting broccoli, spring cabbage, leeks, chard, overwintered onions, forced rhubarb and stored roots. In the dead months when day length is under ten hours, do not fight the light. Use that time for maintenance: order seed, sharpen and oil tools, turn the compost, spread mulch, repair netting and fences, plant fruit trees while dormant, and draw next year's plan. Work done in the dark months is what makes the busy months possible.
Write it down and correct it
A plan that lives in your head is not a plan. Keep one page per year: a bed map, the sowing calendar, and a short log of what you sowed, when, and how it did. Note the failures in particular, because those are the entries you will actually use. Rotate families around your beds on a three or four year cycle as you plan. The Crop Guide on this site gives sowing and harvest months per climate zone for each vegetable, and the Planting Calendar orders them for your zone, but your own log of what really happened in your garden always beats both.
Check yourself
Two productive plants picked young feed a family for months; four will produce more than most households can eat.
Green manure protects the surface, feeds soil life and suppresses weeds until the bed is needed.
In temperate gardens it runs March to May and is filled by sprouting broccoli, spring cabbage, leeks and stored roots.
Relative timing to your own frost dates and soil temperature travels to any latitude and either hemisphere.
Try it for real: Draw your twelve month plan
- List the six vegetables your household eats most and estimate annual quantities
- Draw twelve columns and mark your last and first frost dates
- Place each crop by counting weeks from those two dates
- Write a follow-on crop for every bed and a green manure where there is none
- Keep a one line log each week and review it at the end of the season
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Written and checked by the Human Skills team against the sources below. How we check our content
- RHS Vegetable Garden Planner Guidance
- FAO Family Farming and Home Garden Guidelines
- Cornell University Vegetable Growing Guides
