Planning Your Garden

There are six simple steps to get your Harvest at Home garden going:

Step 1: Garden Survey
Step 2: Harvest Planning
Step 3: Raised Bed Design
Step 4: Garden Support Design
Step 5: Soil Management
Step 6: Harvest and Enjoy

Garden Survey

The garden survey allows us to determine the best location for your garden. Things that factor into where to place your garden include the amount of sun each location gets and access to a water supply. In addition, we’d need to know of any “pests” that like to frequent your yard so that we can plan the appropriate pest barriers, such as gopher screens or deer fencing.

Harvest Planning

With a Harvest at Home garden, your food choices are limited only by season and your own taste. We’ll help you decide:

What crops you want in your initial planting
What crops you want for the next season’s planting
How much of each crop to plant (depending on the size of your family, the yield of each crop, and the number of beds you’ve chosen)

Once you choose the crops you want, we’ll help you choose the specific varieties of each.

Raised Bed Design

After we determine the best location for your garden, we can begin the installation of your raised beds.

We design your beds to fit into your existing landscaping using whatever materials you desire. The following are a few examples of the different styles you can choose.

Garden Support Design

In addition to determining the raised bed style, we’ll also need to know your preferences for any supporting structures that are required, including:

Plant supports (bamboo, willow, metal)
Whether deer fencing is required
Whether bird netting is required (usually we need to wait and see about this)
Whether shade cloth is required; this depends on what crops you’ve chosen and where we place the garden

Soil Management

A big part of a healthy and sustainable garden is good soil and the best way to maintain and improve your soil is to compost. We will manage your soil health using compost produced from your garden as the primary soil amendment. There are many attractive choices for compost bins available today. To create a soil management plan you need to decide:

What type of compost bins you want to use
What yard waste you will compost
Where to place the compost bins

Harvest and Enjoy

After you’ve made all of the decisions about garden placement and design, all you need to do is sit back and wait for your harvest. While we believe that most people will want to harvest their own food so that it gets used when it is freshest, there may be times that you are unable to harvest your food. Or, you may want us to harvest the food for you. In planning your harvest, we should ensure that a crop is not going to need to be harvested when you are away. Although we cannot avoid this completely, if you know that you are going to be away for a length of time, you should let us know so that we can adjust when we plant your crops.

Many crops are time-sensitive as to when they must be harvested (asparagus, for example, must be harvested on a specific day). Unless you plan to watch your crops closely, we’ll need a way to alert you to upcoming harvests.

Although we try to plan crop yields according to your needs and availability, sometimes plants produce more food than we expect or crops mature when you are on vacation. We will deliver any excess food to a local hunger relief program at your request.