This Prepared Life
Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. Hosted by Allison Michael, this show is about creating a calmer, more resilient life through everyday preparedness and intentional living. Inside the episodes, you’ll find realistic food storage tips, Allison’s Three Layer Food Storage system, preparedness skills, homemaking rhythms, and encouragement to help you care for yourself and your family with more confidence and less overwhelm. From emergency preparedness and food preservation to homemaking and building a well-stocked pantry, this podcast offers practical guidance to help preparedness feel more natural in your everyday life. Whether you’re filling your first pantry shelf or have been preparing for years, you can expect simple action steps, honest conversations, and a reminder that preparedness does not have to come from fear. Here, we believe in being prepared, not scared — one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time.
This Prepared Life
Garden 101 - Garden Planning - Ep20
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This is part three of the Garden 101 Series. Today, we are talking about one of the most exciting parts of gardening. Join me for a discussion about how I plan my garden, how I handle garden notes, what I plant, how much I plant, and figuring out where and when to plant for your growing zone.
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Welcome to this Prepared Life podcast where homestudying and the apocalypse meet. I'm Alison, your host. Hi, and welcome to this prepared life. I'm Alison, your host, and today we are finishing up our series on gardening, and I'm going to share about how I plan my garden. And how I do it will not work for everyone, but I hope that you can find some tidbits of information in here that will be useful to you. If you missed the first two episodes, we talked about planning your garden if you're starting from scratch. And then the very first one, we talked about just general garden terms. So if you are brand new to gardening and you missed those, I suggest you go back and check out the garden terms because I'm going to use a lot of those terms in this episode, but I am not going to define them for you. So that was garden terms and then garden planning. So gardening for us, I know I've said this before, but gardening is a year-round process. It is not something that stops in the winter or the fall. Garden season, you know, is spring and summer, and we are tending the garden and weeding and harvesting and canning that harvest. But the winter is where the planning comes in. It's where I spend time pouring over my garden notes and noting what did well the year before, what varieties did not do well that I maybe don't want to grow again. And I really spend time and effort and my energy in planning for the next season to make that the best that it can be and to provide as much food for my family as we can. So the first thing I do is I just make a list of everything that I want to grow. And I also know what do I want this crop for? Is it just for fresh eating? Am I planning to use it in canning or freezing? So, as an example, you know, I'm I'm gonna write lettuce down. We eat a lot of salads in the spring, but I'm not preserving those. So those are really just fresh eating. But tomatoes, we are eating those fresh. And the only time of year I eat tomatoes is when I grow them in my garden. Um, once you have tasted a garden tomato, it is so hard to go back to store tomatoes. But we're also canning and preserving those tomatoes. I'm making our own sauce to last us, you know, as long as we can throughout the year. I freeze cherry tomatoes for tossing into just different meals in the winter. Um, so I write that down on my list: fresh, canning, freezing, dehydrating, just the different preservation things I'm I usually do with those. That way, when I'm planning out how much I know I need more or less of the item. So the second thing I do after I have listed everything that I want to grow, these are the things we eat. I write how much of each plant I want. And when I first started gardening, I just wanted a list. You need to grow 52 tomato plants to last your family through the season and to get your year's worth of sauce. And that is unfortunately not how it works. There's a lot of trial and error in this because every family eats different amounts of things. We don't eat a lot of pasta, so I go through maybe less tomatoes than other families who might eat a lot of pasta. So it's really just trial and error and thinking about how your family eats throughout the year and what you might need. So there are charts online, and you can search for those that give just the average plant yields. And I use those as a base, but I always plant extra. And I plant extra because bugs, weather, disease, life circumstances happen and the weeding doesn't get done. Like so many different things affect the yield of a plant. So I would rather have more than we need than less. If I have more than we need, then I am able to give that away to other people. I am able to sell it. Maybe you're donating it to the food bank. I always plant extra just for that variety of reasons. The third thing I do is I know how much space each plant needs. And this is something that as you grow in your experience gardening, you're not gonna have to look up every every year. Like, I don't write down exactly how many inches of space my lettuce needs every year. I just kind of know that if I have one raised bud constantly going of lettuce, that's gonna meet the needs of our family. So again, it's trial and error and it's learning. But in the beginning, when you are just starting, you can use, you know, those charts you find online, use your seed packet because that will also say how much space the plant needs. And that helps you plan where in your garden those plants are going to go. So for me, I have a large map of my garden on graph paper. And then I also have smaller maps, and my large graph paper map is to scale, but my smaller maps, usually they're just like a handwritten scribble. Sometimes I make them to graph paper. I think it depends on my mood. Those smaller maps that I make each year are that year's map for that smaller space, and I write all my notes on it. So while my big map, and it's so hard to, I wish I could show you. Um, you can go to my Instagram and see pictures. There's always pictures of my garden stuff there. But my large map shows every area and where it is on the garden. But the smaller map might just be these three raised beds, and I will write, you know, the date, planted carrots, and what variety of carrots and how many feet or how many plants I put in that section. And so that's what my smaller maps are. And they come out with me to the garden every day. Every time I go to the garden, I take a clipboard with these smaller maps because I'm writing notes. And maybe I'm writing this variety of green beans is really not doing well here. Because then when I come back into fall and winter and I'm looking through these notes, I remember that because no matter how much I think I will remember, these things I don't. So writing them down is important. So back to where in the garden your plants are gonna go. You're gonna look at the space you have, and then you look at how much space that plant requires, and then you multiply it by how many of those plants you want, and that is gonna dictate where those plants are gonna go. And maybe you're doing row planting and they're all gonna go in one big row together. Maybe you're doing raised buds and you got to sprinkle them about. Maybe you are doing spot gardening and you are just putting plants where you can find space for them in your yard, but knowing the space you have available and how much space those plants take is important. So you're not overcrowding your plants and you're getting the best yield for them. So the next thing I do, and this is probably the thing everyone gets so excited about, is I sit down with my seed packets. And at this point, I've already ordered my seeds and my seeds are delivered, so I have them and they're ready. And this is when I'm figuring out when. When do these seeds need to either be started in my greenhouse or go into the ground? And I am a huge rule breaker when it comes to starting seeds in the greenhouse. I start almost everything in my greenhouse because I much prefer to put established plants into my garden than sow seeds. I'm not sure if they're gonna grow or not. Being as I live in a shorter climate with a shorter season, this also gives me a jump start knowing that those plants had a little extra time in the greenhouse. But I sit down with my seed packets and I print a blank calendar and then I mark my last and first frost dates on that calendar. Once I have those two dates on there, I start counting backwards from first frost, which is in the fall. First frost is in the fall, all the way to probably February or March-ish. And so, and I am literally actually writing the numbers down on that calendar so that I can kind of have an idea of days to harvest. So last frost is zero, and your first frost is your days to harvest. That's your growing season, that's how much time you have to work with between frosts. So I start writing all of those down, and I count negative numbers into February and March because that gives me my days and weeks of the things I'm planting in my greenhouse. And then I start making a list of okay, tomatoes, and I look at the back of the seed packet, and it might say, you know, eight to ten weeks before. And so on my eight to ten weeks before last frost, I write down my tomato varieties because I know that's when I need to plant those. Or maybe you have something and it says plant two to four weeks before last frost. And so I would go to the two to four weeks section of my calendar and write down whatever variety of plant that is. And so that's really going one by one through your seeds and just marking down, okay, on my calendar, this is when I need to plant these things. So the next thing I do is I wait impatiently for the dates on my calendar that I get to start those seeds. And I am always itching and ready to go, and usually end up starting something too early just because I need to get my fingers in the dirt. Um, but yes, so then you wait impatiently and you care for your seedlings and start planting outside as soon as your last frost happens. So that's just a nutshell of how I plan. First, I make a list of everything that I want to grow. Second, I make a list of how much of each thing I want to grow. Then I plan where in the garden it's going to go. And then I plan when it needs started in my greenhouse or sewed outside. And then I start planting. So, how I plan my garden in a nutshell, I hope that you can take some of that information and that in this podcast format, this makes some sense. And if you have any questions, you can feel free and find me on Instagram and message me, or you can shoot me an email at this preparedlife at gmail.com. I am always happy to answer questions and open to helping people take their next steps in their journey. And I also have gardening highlights on my Instagram profile, which will link to different posts outlining outlining this information as well as just our journey through gardening in the past years. So check those out. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening today. And until next time, remember, every little thing matters, and a goal without a plan is just a wish. If you have questions, you can find me on Instagram at this prepared life. I'd love to connect with you over there. You can also find me on the internet at www.thispreparedlife.com. And if you enjoyed today's podcast, I would love it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts.