Planning Your Next Growing Season: Dream, Scheme, and Get Ahead

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Alright, this is one of my favourite topics to talk about, and it’s the one thing that separates the gardeners who have amazing seasons from the ones who spend every year playing catch-up. Planning. I know, I know — not exactly thrilling, is it? But hear me out, because the hours you spend now, in the quiet of winter, dreaming and scheming about next year’s growing season will pay back tenfold when spring arrives and you actually know what you’re doing. Unlike me for the first three years, when my approach to garden planning was essentially “buy whatever seeds look nice on the rack and figure it out later.” Spoiler: it didn’t work out well.

Winter is the perfect time for this. The plot’s quiet, there’s nothing urgent demanding your attention, and you’ve got the luxury of time to sit with a cuppa and actually think. I do most of my planning between Christmas and the end of January, usually sat at the kitchen table with my garden journal from last year, a notepad, and the seed catalogues that have been arriving since November. Julie says I get more excited about seed catalogues than Christmas presents. She’s not wrong.

Step 1: Review Last Season — Be Honest With Yourself

Before you start planning what you’re going to grow, you need to look back at what happened last year. This is where your garden journal is worth its weight in gold. If you don’t keep one, start this year — even just a cheap notebook where you jot down what you planted, when, and how it went. Future you will be incredibly grateful.

Go through last season and ask yourself some questions. What grew really well? What was a disaster? What did you grow too much of? (I’m looking at you, courgettes. Four plants. FOUR. We were giving courgettes away to strangers in the street by August.) What did you not grow enough of? What did you spend ages nurturing only to discover nobody in your house actually likes eating it?

That last one is important. I spent an entire season carefully growing celeriac because Ronny raved about it. Beautiful plant, grew well, produced a decent-sized root. Took it home, cooked it, and nobody in the family would touch it. Including me. It tasted like celery that had been in a fight. Lesson learned — grow what you actually eat, not what you think you should be growing because someone else does.

Also look at timing. What went in too early and got frosted? What went in too late and didn’t mature before autumn? Where were the gaps — periods where nothing was ready to harvest? These are all things you can fix with better planning this time around.

Step 2: Plan Your Crop Rotation

Crop rotation is one of those things that sounds complicated but is actually dead simple once you get your head around it. The basic idea is that you don’t grow the same type of crop in the same spot year after year. Different plant families take different nutrients from the soil and attract different pests and diseases. If you keep planting brassicas in the same bed, the soil gets depleted of the specific nutrients they need and diseases like clubroot build up in the soil.

The classic four-year rotation splits crops into four groups. Group one is legumes (peas, beans, broad beans) — these actually ADD nitrogen to the soil. Group two is brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower) — these are hungry plants that benefit from the nitrogen left by last year’s legumes. Group three is roots (carrots, parsnips, beetroot, turnips) — these prefer less-rich soil and do well after brassicas. Group four is potatoes and other solanaceae (tomatoes, peppers) — these are greedy and need well-manured soil.

Draw a rough plan of your beds and assign each group to a section. Next year, everything moves one bed around. The legumes go where the potatoes were, the brassicas go where the legumes were, and so on. It’s simple, it works, and it means your soil stays healthy without you having to do anything except move things around.

Step 3: Choose What to Grow — The Fun Bit

This is where the seed catalogues come out and things get dangerous. Because there’s nothing quite like flicking through pages of gorgeous vegetables, each one promising better flavour, bigger yields, and disease resistance that makes them sound practically superhuman. And before you know it, you’ve ordered enough seeds to plant a commercial farm.

My advice? Start with the staples — the things your family actually eats regularly and that are either expensive to buy or noticeably better homegrown. For us, that’s potatoes (because homegrown new potatoes are in a completely different league to shop-bought), tomatoes (same — no comparison), runner beans, salad leaves, courgettes (ONE plant this year, Tony, ONE), beetroot, onions, and garlic. These form the backbone of our growing season and between them, they keep us in fresh veg from June to November.

Then add in a couple of “fun” crops — things you want to try because they look interesting or because you’ve never grown them before. This year I’m having a go at sweetcorn (because JB grew some last year and wouldn’t stop going on about how easy it was) and florence fennel (because Audrey says it’s gorgeous roasted and I trust her judgement on food more than anyone).

Don’t go overboard though. It’s better to grow ten things well than twenty things badly. Every crop needs space, attention, and time, and if you spread yourself too thin, everything suffers. My first year, I tried to grow about thirty different vegetables. By July, I couldn’t keep up with the watering, weeding, and feeding, and half of it was a mess. Now I stick to about twelve to fifteen main crops and I’m much happier. Quality over quantity, every time.

Step 4: Make a Sowing Calendar

This is where most people fall down. They’ve got their seeds, they’ve got their plan, but they don’t have a timeline. And then spring arrives and they panic-sow everything at once in March, which means everything matures at the same time and they’ve got a glut in August and nothing in October.

A sowing calendar spreads your sowing dates across the season so you get a steady stream of harvests rather than a boom-and-bust cycle. It takes a bit of working backwards — look at when you want to harvest each crop, then count backwards to work out when you need to sow it. Seed packets usually tell you how many weeks from sowing to harvest, which is your starting point.

For example, if you want to be eating beetroot from July to October, don’t sow it all in March. Sow a row in March, another in April, another in May, and a final one in June. Each batch will mature roughly four weeks after the last, giving you continuous supply. This is called successional sowing and it’s the single biggest game-changer for allotment productivity.

I write my sowing calendar on a big wall planner that goes up in the shed in January. Every sowing date is marked, along with what needs to go where. When spring arrives and things get busy, I just look at the planner and it tells me exactly what needs doing that week. No thinking required, which is handy because by April my brain is running on about three hours’ sleep and pure enthusiasm.

Step 5: Order Seeds Early

If you wait until March to order seeds, you’ll find half the varieties you want are sold out. The keen gardeners (and the professional growers who order in bulk) snap up the popular varieties in January and February. Order your seeds by the end of January and you’ll have the best selection. Most seed companies start shipping within a few days of ordering, and seeds store perfectly well in a cool, dry place until you’re ready to sow.

Speaking of seed companies — support the small, independent ones where you can. The big garden centres sell seeds, sure, but the smaller specialist companies often have much more interesting varieties, better germination rates, and genuinely helpful advice. Some of my favourites are Real Seeds, Vital Seeds, and The Seed Cooperative. They often carry heritage varieties that you won’t find anywhere else, and the growing advice on their packets is usually spot-on for UK conditions.

Also, don’t throw away leftover seeds from last year. Most vegetable seeds remain viable for several years if stored properly (cool and dry). Parsnips are the exception — their seeds are pretty much useless after one year. But tomato, pepper, and courgette seeds can last five years or more. Before you order new ones, check what you’ve already got. I keep mine in an airtight container in the fridge with a sachet of silica gel to absorb moisture. Works a treat.

Step 6: Plan Your Infrastructure

While you’re in planning mode, think about what physical improvements your plot needs. Does your raised bed need repairing? Are your bean poles still standing or did last year’s wind sort them out? Do you need more compost bins? Is the path between the beds a mud bath that needs some bark chippings? Winter is the time to sort this stuff, when you’re not trying to work around growing crops.

I make a list every December of all the maintenance and improvement jobs that need doing. Then I tackle them through January and February when there’s not much else happening on the plot. Last year I rebuilt two raised beds, fixed the greenhouse door (which had been held on with bungee cords since the previous April — don’t judge), and laid a gravel path between the beds. Took about four weekends and the plot looked brilliant by the time spring came. JB said it was the tidiest he’d ever seen it, which from JB is basically a standing ovation.

Step 7: Set a Budget

This one’s important, especially if you’re prone to getting carried away in the garden centre (and who isn’t?). Gardening can be as cheap or as expensive as you want it to be, but if you don’t set a budget, it’s easy to spend more than you intended. Seeds, compost, tools, pots, fertiliser, netting — it all adds up.

I give myself a budget at the start of each season and try to stick to it. This year it’s £150, which covers seeds, seed compost, a few bags of chicken manure pellets, and replacement fleece. Everything else I’m making do with what I’ve got or scrounging. Pots? Saved from last year. Compost? My own from the bins. Bean poles? Hazel from the hedge at the back of the allotment. Stakes? Bamboo collected in autumn. The more you can reuse, recycle, and scrounge, the less you need to spend.

Look after yourselves. Take good care. 🌱