I have a plan!

After much humming and hahing I finally have a plan for what to plant where in the garden.

First draft of garden plan

I used Suttons online veg garden planner, which has a thirty day free trial. Although there's an option to print the plan, the file can't be downloaded from their server, so I had to cheat to bring you the above plan. I hope you enjoy it!

As you'll see, our garden is not a simple shape and measuring it was quite a fiddle. It's not quite right - the bit round the LPG tank (empty space, top left) is wrong - but I think it'll do.

To start with, I went through my list of seeds and tried to fit them all into the garden. This led to... How much space do cabbages need?!!

At this point I returned to my list and considered how much of each veg I might actually need, rather than trying to grow all the seeds I have. For some - well, for the potatoes - I've only bought as many as I need. For others... hmm, I have 1,750 thyme seeds, I want about ten plants. As for the sunflowers...

The sunflowers are represented by the grey and brown knobbly shapes to the top right of the plan. Being a vegetable garden planner, the software doesn't include sunflowers, so I had to use Jerusalem artichokes as the nearest substitute. Either way, they take up a hell of a lot of space. I will try to put more in other parts of the garden (the plan covers that part that's been cultivated before - I have odd bits of rocky hillside, too).

Working out how many of each plant I'd need wasn't always easy. For some plants, like carrots, one plant = one veg, so it wasn't too difficult. Potatoes I'd grown before enough times to have a rough idea of how much I'd get from each plant. Peas were the most difficult. I usually buy these frozen, so I don't have a very good idea of how many peas per pod, or how many pods per plant, or how many peas per serving, come to that. In the end, I took the advice that you can't have too many peas and planned for 665 plants, which is all the seeds I have. I may come to regret this.

I'm treating this plan as a very rough draft, but it's a useful starting point. It shows me that I can fit all the veg (though not all the sunflowers) I want into the garden, just about. I'm not sure I've left any space to walk between them, but I'll deal with that problem when I get to it.