The last several years as I’ve begun to plan our garden, and the time comes to start selecting seeds, the near endless amount of possibilities is both exciting and a bit overwhelming. I’ve explored the websites of many popular seed companies, and have also been introduced to other options through social media channels I’ve followed over the years. As much as I’d like to have dozens of raised beds in the backyard, we have a limited amount of space and therefore our selection of plants each year has to be strategic. We try and plant in succession as much as possible to maximize the use of our space, but we are still somewhat limited in what we can grow.
I’ve used spreadsheets in the past to help me plan out a schedule for sowing seeds and transplanting into the garden. Although this works well, and I’ve found a few free spreadsheets out there with nice formatting and pre-built formulas, it limits how much the kids can be involved in the process. To that end, this year I decided to create my own planning and tracking document that could be printed, which would allow the kids to be more actively involved in the process and see our plan up on the fridge thought the spring season. So far it has been a hit!
If you would like to use what I created, you can download it here:
My oldest loves to look through seed catalogs – and our growing collection of old seed packets – and think about what we might grow in our garden (he thinks we should grow most everything!). This year our second child got more involved in the planning process, and had fun sorting through seed packets with her big brother. She remembered a lot of what was grown last year from the pictures on the packets, and decided we needed to grow “all the flowers!” Because we had bought so many seeds last year in a pandemic-fueled excitement to spend extra time in the garden, we had little need to order many more seeds this year (we plan on over-seeding since the seeds we have are more than 12 months old). First up for indoor sowing are tomatoes and peppers, so we will see how last year’s seeds have held up.
// Dad Gardener
