Start Your Market Garden Plan Now For Next Season

You may just have put your market garden to bed for the winter (if you are in the northern hemisphere) but now is the time to start your market garden plan for next season.

There are a couple reasons to start your market garden plan now: first, if you had a garden this year, the successes and failures are probably still fresh in your mind. So it's a good time to use those 'lessons learned' to improve your chances of success next season.

Second, whether or not you had a market garden this year, there are some aspects of the business that should begin well before the season starts - i.e. setting goals, and planning your marketing and production (see my Growing for Market Get Started Checklist for more on the appropriate timing of these activities.)

And if next season will be your first attempt at a market garden, it's all the more important to start assessing your resources and your readiness to launch.

Setting Goals. Your market garden plan starts with setting goals.This is the first (and most important) step you should take when starting your own bootstrap market garden. This is time well invested in the success of your business. You start by setting a target for sales - whether in dollar amounts, or number of customers for your CSA. You can see more about that process here Build your farm business plan

• When do you want to start and end deliveries?


• When should you start your crops?


• How much of each vegetable do you expect to deliver for each share?


• How many plants do you need to start?


• How much space will each crop take, and how big does your garden need to be?