I find it extremely helpful to make a plan for all of the sowings and plantings for the coming season, and then to rigorously stick to that plan.  With most vegetable farms, having an extended harvest of various crops is important, but with CSA this need is amplified.  For CSA, you’ll likely be growing more types of crops and you’ll be needing a very regular supply of harvests.

I start out by deciding what crops I want to grow over the course of the year (not yet getting down to varieties).  The goal for my CSA is to achieve a regular harvest of the most popular vegetables, while throwing in some less common, or niche additions here and there.

Then I determine how often I want to include each of these crops in the CSA offering.  I make a spreadsheet with each week of the harvest season on the x axis and each of the crops on the y axis.  It takes some knowledge of your climate to know when you can reasonably expect harvests of the various crops.  My advise is to start out conservatively, and slowly push the envelope year by year.  For my spreadsheet, I’ve assigned a $ value to each of the produce items, so that I can see what the total value of each week’s share will be.  I then try to shift things around so that week-to-week the amount of produce is fairly consistent.

Now that I have a harvest plan, I need to convert this into a planting plan.  For this I make a new spreadsheet with all the weeks in the planting season on the x axis, and enough blank spaces on the y axis to list the crops that will be planted that week.  Using the harvest plan I’ve just created, I take one crop at a time and work backwards from the planned harvest date, to the date I need to be planting that crop.

This part is a bit trickier.  Some crops are planted once for multiple harvests (like tomatoes & zucchini), others are planted anew for each harvest.  This can also depend on how big of a patch you sow.  Take carrots as an example.  You can sow enough at one time for a whole month of harvests, or you can sow just enough for two weeks at a time.  To give some examples from my own plan, I sow lettuce and spinach every week, snap beans every two weeks, peas and carrots every three week.  I sow cucumbers just twice each season, and potatoes and winter squash just once for the year.

You’ll also need to consider that some plants are being direct sown and some are being transplanted.  When seed catalogs list the days to maturity for a variety, they are sometimes listing it from direct seeding and sometimes from transplant.  If its from transplant, you’ll need to count back from your planned harvest date not only the number of days to maturity, but also the days it will take for that seedling to grow.  As you get more advanced with this, you can also try to adjust for the fact that growth rates vary across the season.

Perhaps the hardest part is figuring out how much of each crop to plant at each planting date.  For a crop like lettuce heads, it can be fairly straight forward:  Decide whether you’re planting for one or two weeks of harvest, determine how many heads you need a week, and add in some overage.  From this you figure out how many row or bed feet this harvest requires, and how many seedling you’ll need to raise.  It’s not so easy to figure out for crops like carrots, where yields can be really variable, or for zucchini that yield multiple harvests from the same plant.  I’ve been playing with a matrix that would determine this for each crop based on the number of CSA members and the various other markets I harvest for, but it would take a few years of really good record keeping for this spreadsheet to actually work.  Instead, I ended up pretty much winging it the first year, and I can now look back on that and make adjustments for next year.

Hope all this helps!

Tags: direct seed, harvest plan, planning, planting plan, spreadsheet, transplant

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 11:50 pm and is filed under DeepSeeded Community Farm, How-To Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.