Gardening is a journey, and every successful journey needs a plan. The Garden Operation Cycle is your step-by-step guide to growing a productive, thriving garden. Whether you’re just starting or a seasoned grower, this approach helps you stay organized, save time, and get the best results.
By breaking the gardening year into stages like planning, planting, and harvesting, you’ll learn how to use the right tools, techniques, and timing to make each task easier and more effective. It’s all about working smarter, not harder, and enjoying the process along the way.Ready to grow with confidence?
In this excerpt from The Garden Tool Handbook, author Zach Loeks explores how to take your garden from dream to harvest, one simple step at a time.
The Garden Operation Cycle
There is one thing for sure: if you don’t know where you are going, you won’t get there! Another sure thing: know the steps to get there if you want to arrive successfully. This is good advice for gardening. Start-up growers understand they want to grow a garden, but defining that they want a successful garden and what success looks like in terms of variety, yield, quality, and timing is what will help them scale-up. Pro growers know that most of their work falls into a series of steps—tasks that follow each other logically. Successful growing is very much about anticipating the needs of production for each step and meeting them with know-how and the right tools for the job. In this sense, pro growers are masters of timing, tools, and techniques. Let’s first understand the importance of a step-by-step approach, and in “Part 2: Your Garden Operation Cycle,” we will break these stages down into major garden tasks.
Best Management Practices
There are many standards of garden production: Organic Farming, Ecosystem Design, Biodynamics, etc. Most approaches have an underlying list of best management practices, tried-and-true and commonly accepted approaches to gardening. Best management practices should inform our garden opera- tion cycles while also allowing adjustments for innovation within particular systems like Permaculture, Biodynamics, succession planting, etc.
Following the garden operation cycle explained in this book is a tried- and-true approach that makes use of well-accepted and innovative tools and techniques for best results. It is important to know how to simply achieve a garden task, such as seeding, in the best way possible. However, there is more than one way to accomplish any garden task—from seeding to weeding. For instance, straight rows remain a best management practice, a time-tested way of doing things. Straight rows lead to easy weeding, proper spacing, consistency in records, ease of laying drip, etc. At different scales, what changes is how (the tool and technique) not the why! The tools you use to accomplish any task are part of the decision-making matrix for your scale.
Tool, Technique, Timing
Every production stage has a measure of best management success. Successful gardening is all about the right tools for the task, the proper techniques, and optimal timing. For instance, consider using a broad hoe (tool) to hill potatoes (task) by passing on either side of the row and pulling soil into the row for 2″–3″ coverage (technique) every 2 weeks (timing) until the plants begin to die back and the harvest production stage starts. The right tool is the one that meets any weak links in your production stage. For example, if you are bending over to hand seed one seed per inch in five rows, each of which is 25 feet long, it becomes clear that seeding is a weak link in your operation; a push seeder may be the right tool for you. Each tool, like a push seeder or collinear hoe, has its proper techniques, such as the steady foreword push of the seeder without tilting the hopper too much (too much tilt, and the seed won’t get picked up in the hopper). Optimal timing is also crucial. If you seed your crop and it doesn’t rain for a week, it would’ve been optimal to have used a sprinkler to help germination within a few days of seeding to keep everything on schedule.
A Step-by-Step Process
When I first started gardening, I went headlong into it. I had a sense of what to do and when to do it, but honestly if it weren’t for the snow on the ground, I might have tilled my garden before reading the seed catalogs. It is now obvious to me that I needed a sense of what I wanted to grow well ahead of preparing the land. In fact, I would have been wise to first analyze the soil to understand what it could grow even before I started reading those seductive seed catalogs. Then later, I would have planned my garden beds and figured out how to seed, weed, water, etc. Gardening success is a step-by-step process. The time, money, and energy saved through taking the logical seasonal steps are calculable: you save money because you can order exact seed quantities, and you save time because you only have to prepare the right amount of row feet of garden bed for your crops. When we understand these steps, we can see how tools can help us save time and energy, and what is more, we can make sure to buy and make the right tools for each step.
The garden operation cycle is the entire organization of step-by-step processes for a successful year of garden design, planning, preparation, planting, harvest, and more. Within the four seasons, the garden cycle is divided into production stages, like doing greenhouse starts, and subdivided into garden tasks, like seeding the vegetable starts or potting up the transplants. The pro grower knows their garden operation cycle like the back of their hand … or, really, like the front of their spreadsheet. A garden plan will state every stage and show which crops are to be grown where and how they will be grown using which tools and techniques and what timing.
This step-by-step approach is the most powerful concept in gardening! The gardening season can make you feel like you are navigating an MC Escher labyrinth staircase; you will face many obstacles that from the outside look difficult, but, by following the rhythm of a strict garden operation cycle, each step is a successful task leading to a landing where the next production stage is achieved. Eventually, we come full circle to a new year again.
Production Stages and Garden Tasks
Production stages are periods made up of many garden tasks that work together to meet an important and often season-specific garden operational need: seeding, weeding, harvesting, etc. There is no set number of stages, though in this book I present them as 16 stages. Sometimes a production stage occurs only once, such as primary land preparation; other times, a stage repeats only once per year, such as greenhouse starting; or, routines may be ongoing, like seeding and transplanting. Garden tasks are any short-duration job, like row marking, calibrating your seeder, or seeding the rows, that must be done in an orderly fashion, whereas a production stage usually occurs within a timeframe of weeks or months.
