The Market Gardener

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

ORGANIZATION = SUCCESS. For the market garden, this adage is especially true at the production planning stage of the job. This process can be particularly difficult, however, when you have little or no experience as a mixed vegetable grower. It was for this reason that I decided to cover this topic at the end of the handbook, even though crop planning really comes at the beginning of any growing season.

Crop planning is absolutely fundamental to profitable market gardening, and we owe a large part of our success to our skill in this area. Knowing what to grow, how much to grow, and when to plant is not a simple task, especially when precision is required. Doing so requires, above all, an understanding of the steps of crop planning. It might seem confusing at first, but hang in there, it follows a straightforward logic. Then it becomes a matter of following the process through with rigor. The planning stage can be an overwhelming endeavor, but it is worth every effort put into it. All that is carefully planned and anticipated for the year ahead enables the streamlining of many operations during the season. Winter, when more time is available, is the perfect time to do this.

We begin our crop planning sessions after taking a few weeks of vacation away from the gardens. Just as taking a power nap makes for great working afternoons, taking a leave from our daily routine helps us freshen our mind for the task at hand. Our first step is to come up with the annual budget. Setting financial goals is a priority for us because we farm to support our family, first and foremost. Therefore, we must make sure our production will generate targeted revenue, or at least one that we can make do with. Our financial objectives are then translated into sales objectives, which in turn determine our production objectives for the season. While this sequence of priorities may seem obvious to some, many farmers do it backwards, establishing their production capacity first and afterwards hoping to make ends meet. I strongly discourage beginning farmers from working that way. My father would always say, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.“ If you want to make an adequate income by market gardening, it is best to plan for it.

In the CSA model,* production objectives are expressed in the number of shares, their weekly price, and the number of deliveries. For example, producing 60 weekly shares at $23 for 18 consecutive weeks generates about $25,000 in revenue. Determining these numbers will depend on the available growing space, the work force, and especially the grower’s experience—all of which need to be considered. This is the step that determines the scale of a market gardening operation.

The second step is to decide the type and quantity of vegetables to grow in order to reach these production objectives. This step is the more challenging one and is done in two parts: first, you need to roughly decide the contents of the CSA shares for every week of the season. You then need to calculate the planting dates in order to harvest these crops on time and in the quantity that will be required to meet the demand. The tables given in this chapter are very useful for this planning.

The third step is to regroup every seeding by species, making sure that everything fits into the garden space available. With all of this information in hand, you then develop your crop calendar and a garden plan. Once these two are established, running a complex production system becomes much simpler.

Finally, the last step of crop planning is an ongoing one, which is to keep records throughout the growing season, taking notes of what went wrong and/or of what could have been planned more precisely. These notes will be of crucial importance the next time around, when you prepare your crop plan for the following season.

The method described here is by no means universal. Many farmers do it differently, but this process is coherent and is relatively simple to follow. Using our own farm as an example, let’s now go through the whole process one more time, but in detail.

At Les Jardins de la Grelinette, we now produce 120 CSA shares over 21 weeks and sell vegetables at two farmers’ markets for 20 weeks. Since it is hard to determine in advance what we will be able to sell at the farmers’ market (as this is subject to weather, how busy the market is, etc.), we estimate that our market customers equate to 100 extra CSA families. Admittedly, this estimate is a bit of a cheat because the market customers do not necessarily buy the same vegetables as those distributed in the CSA shares, but the demand is similar enough that we can base our planning on this assumption. This also happens to be the simplest way we know of going about it.

So, in total, we plan to produce 220 shares every week, each with an estimated value of around $26 worth of vegetables. This targeted revenue of $117, 260 (220 shares x $26 x 20.5 weeks) is enough to meet our financial objectives, allowing us to enjoy our chosen lifestyle.

What Goes into Shares at Les Jardins de la Grelinette

The vegetables we grow for our CSA service are chosen based on demand. Over time, we have learned which vegetables our members enjoy receiving frequently and which they prefer to receive less often.

FREQUENT VEGETABLES: tomatoes, lettuce, herbs, cucumbers, carrots, summer squash, peppers, onions.

SECONDARY VEGETABLES: garlic, beets, turnips, radishes, snow/snap peas, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, eggplants, Asian greens, arugula, spinach, basil, melons, cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard, kale.

OCCASIONAL VEGETABLES: fennel, hot peppers, tomatillos, chicory, kohlrabi, celery root, celery, winter radishes, winter squash, garlic scapes, sweet corn, Brussels sprouts.

We also use the following principles when putting together the weekly vegetable shares to make our offerings as diverse and enjoyable as possible:

We include between 8 and 12 different items per share on any given week of the season.

We include lettuce in every share (or spinach—early and late in the season).

We include one variety of greens per week (sometimes two or three early in the season) but never give the same greens twice in a row.

We try to include two root vegetables in every share—carrots as often as possible.

We try to have fruit vegetables ready as soon as possible to add value to our shares early in the season.

We include herbs in every share.

We don’t expect to please our entire membership with every share, of course, but we are receptive to member feedback and do make an effort to accommodate their preferences. Having said this, it is important not to let member feedback sway your production decisions too much. It is also advisable not to grow too many different kinds of vegetables in your first season. In my opinion, new market gardeners would do well to limit their production to twenty kinds of vegetables for the first few seasons, and start by mastering the more popular ones and those which are the easiest to grow. For the other vegetables, you may consider purchasing some of your offering from other organic growers for your first few seasons. We’ve always bought potatoes, winter squash, and often watermelons to add to our share. We are transparent about it, and it never bothered any of our CSA partners.

Now that we’ve precisely determined the number of beds, and the seeding dates for every seeding to be done during the season, the next step is to consolidate this information into a procedure that is easy to understand and implement. We do this by writing down the data for every crop in a monthly desk calendar (using the codes H = harvest, I = indoor seeding, DS = direct seeding, and T = transplanting).

At that point we also take the time to systemize other cultivating practices in our calendar. For every planned transplanting or direct seeding, we write the date on which the beds must be prepared, factoring in the time needed beforehand for stale seeding (generally two weeks). We also write in the phytosanitary interventions we want to remember, along with any other information we are liable to forget. For example, if we know that our broccolis will need to be supplemented with boron and molybdenum 10 days after being transplanted, we write that down. If we know that our greenhouse tomatoes need to be fertilized every month, we write that down as well. So on and so forth.

Planting Dates and Quantities

The final step in our winter crop planning session is to make a garden plan that determines the exact placement of all our yearly seedings. Recall that our farmland is divided into 10 plots of equal size, each one occupied by a botanical family or group of vegetables that follow a precise rotation (See Chapter 6, Fertilizing Organically). When describing how we went about establishing our rotation plan, I mentioned that the consequences of the plan can be somewhat restrictive. Now that we’ve gone about deciding what to grow and how much we will need of each crop, we also need to make sure that we have enough room to fit everything into the garden, and within the spatial constraints imposed by our rotation plan.

As I mentioned earlier, once we have developed both our crop calendar and garden plan, we follow though without asking ourselves further questions. This is why it is so important to be really concentrated and focused when doing this work. Developing a crop plan a few days before the seed order deadlines is a really bad idea. Even so, however good a plan we might concoct, it is almost certain that we will discover a mistake in the plan at some point during the season: a miscalculation of the number of days spent in the fields, crop successions too far apart, not enough beds to meet the demand, etc. To prevent these mistakes from happening again the following year, we record all our observations in a loose-leaf binder with a section for each crop. For each cultivar, we note the actual seeding, planting, and harvesting dates along with the yield produced. We also record the number of beds planted, which allows us to adjust our targets for the following year if necessary. At the bottom of each page, we leave a space to note any other useful observations. The sheets in our binder resemble the table on the following page.

Our record keeping system is not complicated or time-consuming, but we’ve learned that it works best when information is recorded on a regular basis, and so we try to do that. Ultimately, crop planning is all about small details that make a big difference.

Record Sheet Example

Eggplant: 1 row spaced every 18 inches. Fertilization: 5 wheelbarrows of compost and 1.6 gallons of poultry manure.

Intervention July 5: pyrethrum to reduce tarnished plant bug population.

Intervention August 30: pyrethrum to reduce tarnished plant bug population.

Note: Beatrice produces well all summer despite presence of tarnished plant bug.

* Production for sale at farmers’ markets can be calculated in just the same way as when planning for CSA production.

* Remember that we are working with intensive spacing, which produces higher yields than may be suggested by similar tables based on different cropping systems.