How many vegetable seeds should I sow?

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CA_Dreamin Oak Park, IL Feb 27, 2009

Hi all,

I grew my first vegetables last summer and enjoyed the experience, so I am planning to increase the number and types of vegetables I grow. I plan to use a 4 by 50 foot sunny stretch next to a fence to grow Chinese cabbage, lettuce, spinach, collards, kale, swiss chard, tomatoes, beans (Kentucky pole and edamame), peppers, eggplant and zucchini. I'm planning on starting seeds indoor soon, but I'm not sure how many I should start of each. I was thinking that I might sow enough of the cold season vegetables to fill the entire bed with the idea that they would be harvested at about the time the warm season veggies would need to go outside. Does that seem like a reasonable plan? Or should I set aside some area for the warm season veggies and leave that area unplanted until they need to go in the ground? Around here, I think that would be late May/early June.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

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Stephen_Albert Kenwood, CA Mar 09, 2009

You have a fairly simple succession planting question. Here's a planning suggestion: list all of the crops you plan to grow. Divide them into two groups: cool-weather crops (for early spring and fall) and warm-weather crops (for summer). Next to each crop note the number of days to harvest (you will find this number on the seed packet), now add 10 days just to be on the safe side (let's say the ground is cold and germination is slow). Next you need to know the length of your growing season (the number of days between the average last frost in spring and the first frost in autumn). Within the growing season you can now plan the succession of crops. So, for example, plant cool-season broccoli in spring (say 70 days) followed by warm-season squash (say 70 days) followed by cool-season lettuce (say 40 days) for a total of 180 days. If your growing season is longer you can fit additional crops into their cool or warm season--choose the crops that mature within the number of days you have to work with.

So you can keep your whole garden growing the entire season, fitting crops in and out of the garden according to season and the number of days to maturity. Now, a simpler but more space consuming scheme would be to reserve part of the garden for cool-weather crops and another part for warm-weather crops.

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LiseP San Antonio, TX(Zone 8b) Mar 11, 2009

I'm not the original poster, but that was a helpful (to me) answer, Stephen_Albert!
LiseP

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kford Lexington, MA Mar 15, 2009

You might try looking at the site Zipharvest.com for seed requirements. It contains a garden designer which details seed requirements and yields after you drag and drop a garden layout. It's quite clever.

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