How to plan your vegetable garden, step by step

Planning a vegetable garden isn't about drawing a grand architectural map with rulers and compasses. It's about asking yourself four or five good questions at the right time of year, and keeping a record of your choices. When you do it well, the rest takes care of itself.

Most gardeners I meet complain about the same thing: "I start in April, I sow everything at once, and by early July I'm drowning in courgettes while the radishes already bolted to seed." We've all lived that story. It points to one and the same problem: we planted, but we didn't plan.

Step 1 — Know your ground (before anything else)

Before you flick through a single seed catalogue, take an hour to observe the corner where you'll be planting. The data you gather there will shape every decision that follows.

Sunlight

How many hours of direct sun per day at peak season? Six hours and up, you can grow almost anything. Four to six, lean toward leaves (lettuce, chard, cabbage) rather than fruit (tomatoes, squash). Less than four, forget the classic vegetable garden and look at potted herbs, strawberries, or shade-tolerant greens.

Soil

Clay (sticky, heavy when wet), sandy (slipping through your fingers, dries out fast), chalky (pale, stony) or the famous "good soil" in between? Take a handful from 20 cm down, wet it, squeeze it between your fingers. The result tells you whether to amend (compost, well-rotted manure) before you even plant.

Local climate

Your average last spring frost date determines when you can put tender plants outdoors (tomatoes, courgettes, basil). It varies a lot, even within a single country: from late March in mild coastal areas to mid- or late May further inland or higher up. When in doubt, give it a week of margin: losing a weekend hurts less than losing every plant.

Step 2 — Pick few plants, but well

The beginner's number-one mistake is wanting to grow everything. Tomatoes, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, melons, watermelons, cucumbers, beans, peas, cabbage, lettuce, radish, carrots, beetroot, chard, spinach, onions, garlic, shallots, strawberries, herbs… On 20 m², it's unmanageable.

The right reflex: start small and succeed well. Five or six crops the first year, chosen because:

• You genuinely love eating them (and so do your folks).
• They're suited to your climate and soil.
• They don't demand expert know-how.
• They give a spread-out harvest (not a tidal wave in June then nothing).

A solid starter set: cherry tomatoes (easy, generous), courgettes (very productive), dwarf French beans (sown in place, low-maintenance), cut-and-come-again lettuce (leaf-by-leaf for weeks), basil and parsley (must-have companions).

Step 3 — Stagger sowings and harvests

This is the subtlety nobody taught us at school and the one that changes everything. Instead of sowing 40 radishes on 1 April (and having them all ready on 25 April), sow 10 radishes every 10 days from mid-March to mid-May. You'll have fresh radishes for two months instead of two weeks.

Apply the staggering rule to every short-cycle crop: radish, lettuce, turnip, spinach, French beans, finger carrots.

Crops that stagger themselves

Some plants are long-cycle but produce continuously over months: tomatoes, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, climbing beans, ever-bearing strawberries. For those, you plant once and harvest long. The trick is to size the number of plants per mouth to feed (count 2 to 3 tomato plants per person, 1 to 2 courgette plants — no more, trust me).

Step 4 — Think rotation, even on a small plot

On the same patch, don't repeat the same plant family from one year to the next. Solanaceae (tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, potatoes) deplete the same resources and encourage the same soil-borne diseases. Same goes for cucurbits (squash, courgettes, cucumbers, melons), brassicas, legumes, root crops.

A simple three-year rotation:

1. Year 1 — hungry fruiting vegetables (tomatoes, courgettes, peppers) on the richest zone.
2. Year 2 — leafy crops (lettuce, cabbage, chard) that benefit from the residual fertility.
3. Year 3 — legumes (beans, peas) that return nitrogen to the soil, or root crops (carrots, beetroot) that structure deeper.

On three square metres, it matters as much as on three hundred.

Step 5 — Keep a real record

This is the step everyone skips, and the one we all regret year after year. Note what you planted, where, when, and how it went. Three lines per crop are enough. Next year, you pick up your plan in five minutes instead of reinventing everything.

A sheet of paper works. But if you want your plan to evolve through the season — to remember the milestones for you (mulch 2 weeks after planting, first harvest 70 days after sowing, and so on) — a dedicated app saves an enormous amount of time.

How FloreSage takes care of all of it

That's exactly what the FloreSage app is for: turning your plan into a living schedule, without you having to remember everything.

• You set your soil, your climate, your sun exposure once. The app pre-selects plants suited to your spot.
• You pick your plants — and for each one, I already know the full cycle: sowing, transplanting, mulching, pruning, feeding, harvesting.
• I turn that cycle into small tasks slotted into your real calendar, factoring in the local weather.
• If a frost wave is coming, I warn you in time to protect your tender plants.

You tick as you go, I adapt. A plant that runs late automatically shifts the tasks that follow. No pressure, no guilt. Just a companion who keeps your plan alive.