Plan Your Garden with our FREE Garden Planner Graph Paper Excel Template

I love when artistic gardeners sketch their garden plans, and you can see how these creative folks imagine their yields of summer buzzing with bees and sunshine.  I wish I could plan like that, with such grace and aesthetic sensibility.  But I suck at drawing and make lots of mistakes.  I need a tool for the job of planning a garden.

Putting the broilers out to pasture and building a bigger coop

Let’s get right to it. We’ve been busy lately.  The garden is mostly planted. The broilers are now outside. The new chicken coop is about 80% finished.  But boy has it been a lot of work to get to this point!  

Garden Update Mid July

I have been trying to practice restraint in our garden beds. Such a tough thing to do when you are excited as we are about growing our own food from seed!  The lettuce, kale, and swiss chard are taking off and we even saw sweet peas this week! It all looks so pretty almost too pretty to eat.

Hügelkultur – How to Easily Make Free and Sustainable Raised Garden Beds

Say it 3 times fast: Hügelkultur! Hügelkultur! Hügelkultur!  That’s right, that “u” has an umlaut, so you know we mean business. But just because we’re going to get down and dirty doesn’t mean hügelkultur is difficult. In fact, you can take any patch of lawn on your land and convert it to a raised hügelkultur garden bed in under an hour.  Seriously! I did it while our almost 3 year old threw constant distractions my way and started up conversations with every worm she found.

Gardening with Infants and Small Children

I just went outside and worked in the yard.  It was lovely. It was HOT. I sweated more than I have in months…have we mentioned that it was a really long winter up here in NH? I have been so excited and invigorated since the snow melted.  But, I found this year has been different as I started my yard work and gardening with a newborn and toddler/preschooler in tow.  And while I want to think it doesn’t change much, it totally stopped me in my tracks and made me reconsider a few things.

5 Lessons We Can Learn from Commercial Farming

As we take steps into this gardening season, it is important to give ourselves a moment and take a step back to reflect, plan, and prepare.  Review a chapter on mulching in your favorite gardening book, take a walk around your garden beds and see how the soil is doing, and… take advice from big commercial farms?  Wait, aren’t they evil? 

Using Google Calendar to Plan Your Vegetable Garden and Other Farm Tasks

Every farmer has a system they swear by for planning their garden.  Some use graph paper and sketch out their plots, others write scrupulous notes in journals and track all activity through the year, and others scratch notes into the beams in their shed with a pocketknife.  One thing is consistent, though: to have a successful garden, you need to plan and pay attention.  What do we do?  Believe it or not, we choose to rely on some modern technology around here and use Google Calendar to plan out our vegetable garden, chickens, maple syrup, and any other chores we want to ensure get done at the right time.  Google Calendar is a great way to do this that keeps us on top of things while being easily accessible on any of our devices.  And best of all, it is FREE.