As a novice gardener, there is indeed much to learn on the road to self-sufficiency when starting a simple life. But I guess the first step to take when challenging yourself with learning new skills is to know the level you are at and educate yourself to realise you know even less than you first thought.
When it comes to my gardening experience, it’s pretty modest. 6 years ago, Daniel and I started our first garden at our Spanish rental. We harvested a few radishes, a few potatoes and a handful of beans and beet.
I also had a failed attempt at gardening last year on our land. I attribute my failure mostly to the drought, the fact that we were so incredibly busy with building the house and that I tried to experiment too much for the first year. Nonetheless, we did harvest a few sweet potatoes (thanks to Stacy & Doug’s awesome how-to-grow sweet potato video), a few tomatoes, many spaghetti squashes and 9 very very small bi-colour corns. So, it’s fair to say that our harvest was not enough to sustain us for a full year.
Now that our house is in better shape meaning that it’s erected, although not yet connected to the grid fully. Our focus for the year is to become more self-sufficient.
Preparation for the future
When setting up a new homestead from scratch, there is so so so much to do. It’s especially true in our case because our land was a pretty bear when we purchased it. And as you guys know, we’re also planning to turn our homestead into a thriving touristic business. So some planning is required even for the first year.
So what does it mean?
Well, because 50% of our land (more or less) is already reserved for rural tourism. We have to cleverly plan our crops. Thus, flipping garden beds will be essential and so will excellent timing.
A garden planning app that made it all easy
At this point, I so incredibly wished I had found seedtime before I did. Thankfully, it’s early march, so some of you may benefit from it still as planning for gardens and seedlings is very much ongoing in some parts of the world.
For us this year, well, it might just be too late. or is it? Maybe not…
After watching 2 friends on YouTube using the garden planning app seedtime, it took me 2 seconds to sign-up. Jess & Sean had so many good things to say about it. So it was almost guaranteed we’d love it too.
While our friends’ context is very different to ours in some ways. It is also very similar.
For example, both Sean & Jess successfully gardened last year. However, despite their success, it was very validating to me to hear they still wondered when to start their seedlings. Their grow zone is also very different to ours since they are in the USA. So is their soil as their context call for a forest garden.
The Fastest FREE Way to Plan Your Garden Ever
By default, I’m a person who needs to see it to believe it. So the fact that the garden planning app seedtime claimed to be “The Fastest FREE Way to Plan Your Garden Ever”, gave me zero reassurance. In fact, for me, it was more the opposite. I could already smell a rat when I read the strapline, there is nothing free in life.
Ok creating an account is free sure. But creating an account is always free anyways. So why brag about that especially because the garden planning app is still in beta? So yep, I’d expect a free signup DOH!
Creating an account to get access to the garden planning app seedtime only took me a minute or so. Love it when a signup form is optimised.
Discovering a very powerful garden planning app
After confirming my email address, I quickly got access to the garden planning app. Right from the get-go, I realised that it was no ordinary free crop planning program.
Indeed, the first thing the app asked me was to enter my address. And the system even found my address (Starlink didn’t LOL). So a growing zone was assigned to my profile. After this, I clicked on the calendar icon in the left-hand side menu and then click on Add crop.
It’s there that I truly witness that this crop planning program was more advanced than any other garden planning app I had tried and ditch before. Truth be told, at this point I was expecting to be prompted by a “enter your credit card” popup. But actually, I wasn’t and I even had access to most features for free! Awesome!
Planning for sweet potatoes
Because I had some success with sweet potatoes last year and found some bio-orange (whatever they are called) sweet potatoes at LIDL which are already in the water and will sprout at some point I hope. Sweet potatoes were the first crop I added to the seed planning app. In just 2 clicks Seedtime told me when to prepare my beds when I’d cultivate and when I’d harvest sweet potatoes. Turns out that I still got time to plant as the first sweet potatoes start should be planted mid-may for an expected harvest in late September.
Planning for onions
You guys know that onion seedlings have been a pretty big challenge this year with limited space, etc. However, it does seem that we’re having some success as little green bits have already started to pop out of the soil.
At this point, I somewhat have an idea of when I should plant our onions thanks to some googling. But now that I have a seed planning app all it took was 2 clicks to know when to prepare our beds, when to transplant our seedlings and when to harvest.
Continuing to plan our crop and realising my mistakes
The garden planning app also helped me realise my timing was off with my tomatoes seeding. In fact, according to seedtime, I should be starting my tomatoes in 2 weeks, ho well. Yikes, the tomato seeds are already in the dirt. And I can’t say they are doing all that well to be honest. The limited house space means that it’s challenging to keep seedlings inside. It is what it is, can’t win them all.
Realising the garden planning app limitation
Without a doubt, seedtime is one of the most powerful seed planning or garden planning apps I’ve ever used. So Sean and Jess were right (again!!) Even if I use the free version for now. Truth be told, Thanks to seedtime I now know when to plant my basil, beets, cabbages, onions, corn, squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and standard potatoes. Awesome stuff!
However, it is worth pointing out that seedtime’s list of free crops is very extensive and includes more crops than I’ll ever need even with the free version. To know when to plant our peanuts, I would have to upgrade to the premium version. So since peanuts will be a test crop for us this year, I might google it instead of upgrading. But I’m sure I’d see value in upgrading and will most certainly do in the future. For now, we just have other priorities. And the freebie works for us. So maybe it’ll work for you too?
Just to give you an idea, this is what our garden schedule will look like in 2023. This year, we opted to focus mostly on crops we’ll use every day (mostly). But we did leave a bit of room for experimentation. Because testing stuff is always fun.
If you want to you can create an account on Seedtime there. Know that this is an affiliate link. This means that once your signup, we’ll get $5 in free seeds which we will most certainly include in a giveaway at some point. Using our affiliate link also means that if you upgrade we’ll get a 40% commission but this will be at no extra cost to you. So you can help our homestead even if you’re not here to hand us a hand setting up the garden if you’d like.
