Size your first garden to the time you have
What a vegetable garden asks of a week, how goals change the plan, and how to choose a first crop list and a size you can keep up with through August.
Start here Essentials
This module asks for one decision: a garden size and crop list you can keep up with in a July week. Everything marked Go deeper is optional on a first pass.
- Write your goals. Choose up to three from setup's list and write one sentence for each. Goals change the plan.
- Count your July hours. Write the hours you could honestly give the garden in a working week in July, not in April. Practice.
- Match the size to the hours. Find your hours in the starting-size table. If your space is bigger than that row, choose the part you will plant this year. The week-of-work tables.
- Cut your crop list. Ask of each crop: does the household eat it weekly, and does it fit the light, the space and the effort? The four filters.
- Fill in the garden brief. If you rent or share a plot, send the written question your landlord, association or coordinator must answer before you build. The notebook.
Minimum time: about 30 minutes. Done when: the garden brief is filled in, with a size and a crop list that match your July hours.
1. A garden is a weekly commitment Understand
Most first gardens are sized by enthusiasm in April. A sunny weekend, a seed catalog and a trip to the garden center produce a plan that fits the space available, not the time available. The plants go in, the spring weather is mild, and for six weeks the garden asks very little. Then July arrives. The weeds that germinated with the crops are now knee high, the tomatoes need tying, the beans need picking, a dry week means an hour with the hose, and a family holiday means ten days with nobody watering at all. The garden that was planned for the space becomes a garden that is abandoned in the heat.
This module sizes the garden to the week instead. The question is not "how much can I plant?" but "how much can I keep up with in the busiest, hottest week of the season?" A garden that answers that question honestly is smaller than most first plans, and it is a better teacher: every plant in it gets watched, every problem gets noticed early, and the records it produces are complete enough to plan from next year.
Convention Clemson Cooperative Extension's garden planning fact sheet puts the principle plainly: the garden should be "as small as possible to cut down on unnecessary work." That is one extension service's advice about layout and effort, not a rule about how much food anyone needs. It sits behind every recommendation on this page. A small garden that is kept up through August gives you a full season of observations. A large garden that is abandoned in July gives you a partial season and a weed seed bank that makes next year harder.
A vegetable garden asks for four kinds of work every week of the growing season. They are not equally heavy, and they peak at different times.
- Watering. The steadiest demand, and the one that scales most directly with size. In a dry week it is often the largest single job. It cannot wait long: a missed watering in a hot week can stunt a crop or crack a fruit.
- Weeding. Heaviest in the first six to eight weeks after planting, when bare soil and warm weather bring up a flush of weed seedlings. Light once crops shade the ground or mulch covers it.
- Scouting. Scouting is a deliberate walk past every plant to look for insects, damage, disease and stress, done on a schedule rather than when something looks wrong. It takes minutes in a small garden and is the cheapest work in the season, because a problem found early is usually small.
- Harvest. Light in spring, heavy from midsummer, and unforgiving: many crops are at their best for only a few days. Beans, cucumbers and summer squash left unpicked grow past the size their extension guides recommend.
On top of these four come the jobs that happen once or twice a season: building or filling beds, sowing and transplanting, staking and tying, fall cleanup. Those are real work, but they can be scheduled for a weekend. The four weekly jobs cannot. That is why this module sizes the garden by the week.
The time a job takes depends on the soil, the weather, the tools, the distance to the water and the person doing it. No source this course trusts publishes minutes per square foot for home gardens, and we do not invent them. The tables below give what the sources do support (gallons of water, how often a job recurs, what the job involves) and leave a column for your own timing. The practice task fills that column.
What a garden asks of a week, by size
Watering is the one weekly job that can be calculated in advance, because the amount of water scales exactly with area. Convention University of Minnesota Extension's guidance is that a vegetable garden needs about one inch of water a week, from rain or the hose, and that one inch over 100 square feet is 62 gallons. Physical principle The gallons follow from geometry: the U.S. Geological Survey states that a 1-inch rainfall puts 27,154 gallons on an acre, and an acre is 43,560 square feet, so one inch of water over one square foot is about 0.623 gallons. Multiply your area by 0.623 and you have the gallons in one inch-week.
Minnesota Extension also gives the simplest way to turn gallons into time. Put a 5-gallon pail under the hose, run the hose the way you normally water, and time how long the pail takes to fill. That time is your rate. Their page notes that 62 gallons takes about 12 times as long as one pail. In the table below, the water row is given in 5-gallon pail fills so you can multiply by your own pail time.
| Weekly job | Containers (six pots) | One 4 x 8 ft bed (32 sq ft) | Two 4 x 8 ft beds (64 sq ft) | Plot, 10 x 20 ft (200 sq ft) | Garden, 20 x 30 ft (600 sq ft) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Watering, one inch-week with no rain | No inch figure applies. Penn State Extension says most container gardens need water at least once a day in hot summer months. Water until it drains. | 19.9 gal, about 4 pail fills | 39.9 gal, about 8 pail fills | 124.6 gal, about 25 pail fills | 373.8 gal, about 75 pail fills |
| Weeding | Little: a few square feet of exposed mix per pot | A pass while weeds are small; heaviest for the first 6 to 8 weeks | Same, twice the area | Same; open ground between rows adds work | Same; mulch or hoeing becomes necessary rather than optional |
| Scouting | Look at every plant, top and underside of a few leaves | Every plant, once a week at least | Every plant, once a week at least | Every crop, a sample of plants in each row | Every crop, a sample of plants in each row; edges and fence line for animal signs |
| Harvest, peak weeks | A few picks a week for salad and herbs | Several short picks a week | Several picks a week, more if beans or cucumbers are in | Several picks a week; a bigger session for storage crops | Several picks a week plus processing time if you preserve |
| Your time | Measure it in the practice task. Write minutes per job, not a guess. | ||||
The water figures are arithmetic from the one-inch convention (area x 0.623). Rain reduces them: if a gauge shows half an inch fell, half the gallons remain. The weeding, scouting and harvest rows describe what the job involves at each size, not how long it takes. Here is the reasoning behind each row.
Watering. Notice how fast the pail count climbs. At 64 square feet, one inch-week is eight pail fills. At 600 square feet it is 75. A hose that fills a pail in a minute takes over an hour to deliver an inch to 600 square feet, and that hour comes every dry week from June to September. Physical principle A full 55-gallon rain barrel holds about one seventh of an inch over 600 square feet (55 / 373.8 = 0.15), so a barrel helps a small bed far more than it helps a large plot. Minnesota Extension adds two refinements: sandy, well-drained soil may need water twice a week at half an inch each time, and the test of whether to water is the soil itself, dry two inches below the surface. Module 8 turns this into a routine and a drip run time; the water calculator does the arithmetic for your area now if you want it.
Containers. Containers break the inch-per-week rule because a pot holds a small volume of mix with no ground beneath it to draw from. Convention Penn State Extension's container guide says most container vegetable gardens need watering at least once a day during hot summer months, and that the mix should stay moist but never waterlogged. That is a daily job, not a weekly one, and it is the reason a balcony of six pots can ask more of a July week than a 32-square-foot bed. It is also the job that a holiday interrupts. If nobody can water containers for a week in July, plan for that before you plant, not after.
Weeding. Convention Clemson Extension's weed control fact sheet says removing weeds while they are young is important, and that hoeing must be shallow because most vegetable roots sit near the surface. Small weeds come out in seconds with a hoe or a hand; a weed allowed to grow for a month has roots tangled with the crop's and may already be setting seed. That is why weeding time is so uneven. A weekly pass in May and June is quick. A garden left alone for three weeks in June needs an afternoon to recover. Cultivating is breaking the soil surface between plants with a hoe or hand tool to cut off weed seedlings; Clemson advises doing it when the soil is moist but not wet. Clemson also describes mulch as possibly the easiest and most effective way to control annual weeds, because it keeps light off the soil surface. Mulch is Module 8's subject; for sizing, count weeding as a weekly job until the mulch is down.
Scouting. Convention The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's integrated pest management principles put monitoring and accurate identification ahead of any control, because many organisms in a garden are harmless or helpful and a wrong identification leads to the wrong action. A weekly scouting walk is how a home gardener monitors. Scouting time scales with the number of crops more than with area: six crops in two beds take about as long to look over as six crops in a larger plot, because you look at a sample of plants of each. Module 10 builds the routine and the problem log.
Harvest. Harvest work has no fixed frequency in the sources we use, so we describe it by its cues instead. Convention University of Minnesota Extension gives size and timing cues for picking: summer squash at four to six inches long, slicing cucumbers at about six inches, snap beans two to three weeks after bloom while the seeds are immature. A fruit that reaches its picking size on Tuesday is past it by the weekend in hot weather. Test it How often your crops reach picking size is something to measure in your own peak weeks and record in the harvest log, not something to assume. Module 11 covers harvest signs and storage in full.
Matching the size to the hours
The second table is the course's starting suggestion for matching size to weekly hours. It is a judgment built from the first table, not a published standard. Its logic: watering must fit inside the hours with room left for the other three jobs, and the hours you name should be the hours you have in July, not in April.
| Weekly hours in July | Starting size this course suggests | Crops | What usually limits it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 hour | Containers or one small bed | Two or three | Watering leaves room for a short scouting walk and little else |
| 1 to 2 hours | One bed or a handful of containers | Three to five | A dry week's watering can take most of the time |
| 3 to 5 hours | Two or three beds, or a small plot | Five to eight | Distance to the water; weeding in June |
| 6 hours or more | A larger plot | Five to eight in a first season | Harvest and processing in August, especially if you preserve |
Test it Treat the table as a hypothesis. If your hose is 100 feet from the bed, if your soil is sand, or if your July includes two weeks away, move down a row. If you already garden and know your pace, your own records beat our table. The point of the table is to make the first-season decision deliberately: you can add a bed in year two, but a bed you could not keep up with in year one has cost you the season's records along with the crop.
Garden work in July means heat, sun, ticks in tall grass and heavy lifting. Drink water and rest in shade on hot days, carry water in loads you can manage, and check for ticks after working near long grass or leaf litter. The course's legal page lists the safety basics with their sources.
Goals change the plan
Two households with the same 64 square feet and the same three hours a week can need different gardens, because they want different things from them. Write your goals down before you choose crops, because the goals decide which trade-offs are acceptable. Setup offers five; most gardens have two or three.
Fresh eating. The most common goal and the most forgiving. The aim is a steady trickle of food over a long season, not a large amount at once. That points toward many crops in small amounts, toward crops that keep producing over weeks (tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, leaf lettuce picked a few leaves at a time), and toward succession planting: sowing a short row of a quick crop every week or two instead of all at once, so the harvest comes in a stream. The CROPS table in this course gives succession intervals from the University of Kentucky's extension page (credited there to Johnny's Selected Seeds): every 7 days for lettuce and radish, every 10 days for bush bean, for example. Succession adds sowing work every week or two, so count it in your hours.
Preserving. Preserving changes the plan in the opposite direction: larger plantings of fewer crops, timed to come in together so a batch is worth the work. It also adds hours in August that do not show up in the garden at all, the time spent processing. Ask the authority This course does not teach canning, freezing, drying or fermenting. Tested methods for home preservation come from the USDA's home canning guidance and from your state's extension service, and those are the sources to follow. If preserving is a goal for a first season, pick one crop to preserve, not four.
Growing with children. The aim is visible progress and something to pick. Fast, large-seeded crops suit it: the course's crop figures (from Colorado State University Extension) give radish about 30 days to harvest, bush bean about 60 and pea about 65, and bean and pea seeds are big enough for small hands to sow. Children also change the safety picture. Ask the authority If your house was built before 1978 or the garden is near a busy road, Module 3's lead section matters more where children play in bare soil, and the health department or a physician is the authority on what a lead result means for a child.
Growing one crop well. A legitimate first-season goal, and an efficient one: one crop studied closely teaches spacing, watering, feeding, pests and harvest timing in a way a sampler of ten crops does not. Tomatoes are the usual choice. Grow two or three varieties side by side and record which did what.
Learning the method. If the aim is to learn how gardening works so the second season is better, the garden notebook becomes the main product and the harvest a by-product. Choose crops that span the course: one cool-season crop sown early, one warm-season transplant, one direct-sown warm crop, one quick succession crop. That set teaches the whole calendar in Module 6.
Goals also bring in the people. Who eats from the garden decides amounts. Who helps decides the hours. Who owns the ground decides what you are allowed to build. The garden brief records all three.
Amounts per person are conventions, and they disagree Go deeper
Extension services publish how much to plant per person. They are useful starting points and they are easy to over-read. Convention K-State Research and Extension's planting guide (MF315) lists an "approximate planting per person" for each crop; Virginia Cooperative Extension's planting guide (426-331) lists plants per person per planting, the number of plantings across the season, and notes that children may need about half the adult amount. Both are one state's figures for a typical season. Here they are for crops a first garden often grows.
| Crop | K-State MF315, per person | Virginia 426-331, per person |
|---|---|---|
| Tomato | 3 to 5 plants | 2 to 4 plants per planting, 2 plantings |
| Bush bean | 15 to 16 ft of row | 10 plants per planting, 4 plantings |
| Lettuce | 10 ft of row (leaf or head) | Head: 5 to 10 plants per planting, 3 in spring and summer and 3 in fall |
| Cucumber | 1 to 2 hills | 2 to 4 plants per planting, 2 to 3 plantings |
| Pepper | 3 to 5 plants | 3 to 5 plants per planting, 2 plantings |
Three things to notice. First, the units differ: plants, feet of row, and hills. A hill in a planting guide is a small group of seeds sown together at one spot, usually for vining crops, not necessarily a raised mound. You cannot compare the columns without converting, and Module 5 does that conversion with spacing. Second, the numbers disagree even where the units match. Neither is wrong; they describe different states, varieties and assumptions. We show both and do not average them. Third, both assume the garden supplies a household's whole season of that crop. A first garden rarely does, and does not need to. An amount per person is a published planting figure meant to supply one person's eating of a crop for a season; use it as a ceiling, not a target.
Convention K-State's guide also says that even a 100-square-foot garden can supply "a good portion" of a family of four's vegetables. That is K-State's statement, and it depends on which crops, how long the season is and how skilled the gardener is. We quote it as theirs. This course makes no claim about how much any garden will produce, and gives no yield figures.
A first crop list of five to eight
A crop shortlist is the five to eight crops you commit to for the first season, chosen before you buy seed. Five to eight is the course's suggestion, not a published standard. Fewer than five gives little to learn from and little variety at the table. More than eight in a small garden means many crops with two plants each, more scouting, more spacing problems and more timing to track, and in a first season the extra crops cost attention the core crops need.
Run every candidate through four filters, in this order.
- Does the household eat it every week in season? This is the filter people skip. A crop nobody eats is work with no return. Kohlrabi is a fine crop; it is a poor first choice for a household that has never bought one.
- Does it fit the light? Convention Extension sources give 6 to 8 or more hours of direct sun for fruiting crops (tomato, pepper, squash, cucumber, bean) and 4 to 6 hours for many leafy and root crops. You measure your light in Module 2; until then, mark each crop "needs full sun" or "tolerates part shade" and leave the decision open.
- Does it fit the space? Spacing is in the crop guide. A winter squash at 24 to 36 inches can take a third of a 4 x 8 bed by itself. Potatoes take K-State's 50 to 100 feet of row per person. Big crops belong in big gardens.
- Does it fit the effort? Some crops ask more of a week than others: tomatoes need staking and tying, succession crops need a sowing every week or two, crops started indoors need weeks of care before they reach the garden (Module 7). Count the effort against the hours.
Then check the list as a whole. A balanced first list usually has a mix of cool-season crops (planted in spring before the last frost, such as lettuce, pea, radish, spinach) and warm-season crops (planted after it, such as tomato, bean, cucumber, basil), so the garden produces in more than one month. It has at least one quick crop that rewards you in the first month. And it has no more than one or two crops that sprawl.
Buying transplants for tomatoes, peppers and basil is a reasonable first-season choice and removes five to eight weeks of indoor work (Colorado State's transplant ages for these crops) from the plan. Starting from seed is cheaper per plant and teaches more. Both are covered in Module 7. For sizing, a transplant you buy costs money but no hours in March.
Write the shortlist into the garden brief and choose the same crops in setup. The crop choices drive the planting calendar, the plant counts and every crop-specific green box in the course, so they are worth getting roughly right now. You can change them until Module 5.
The garden notebook starts now
The garden notebook is this course's name for the set of records you keep about your garden: the plan, the soil record, the season log, the problem log and the checklists, all in the tool pages of this site and exportable as one file. The first page of it is the garden brief: a one-page statement of your goals, weekly hours, space, total area, crop shortlist and who helps, plus a sentence in your own words about what would make the season a success.
The notebook starts in Module 1 because the most useful records are the ones you cannot reconstruct later. Convention Iowa State University Extension's page on garden journaling lists what is worth recording: when you sowed, planted and harvested; which varieties and where they came from; how plants performed; a map of where everything grew, for rotation; weather and oddities; tasks done, including any fertilizer or pesticide applied; and pests, diseases and animal damage with dates. A notebook or a phone works; the format matters less than writing it down the same week.
Records do two jobs. During the season they replace memory: when you water, how much rain fell, what you saw on the squash. After the season they turn into next year's plan: which crops the household ate, which bed had the problem, what the maple's shade did to the tomatoes. Module 12 assembles the year's records into that plan. It only works if the records exist.
The course's record sheets are already set up for this. The garden plan's brief sheet is seeded from your setup answers. The season log holds sowing, water and harvest. The weekly checklist turns the four weekly jobs into a list. Everything stays in this browser; the notebook page exports it to a file so you can keep a copy.
The brief is a starting size, not a promise of what the garden will produce. The size table above is this course's judgment, and the amount-per-person figures are one state's conventions for a typical season; your season, varieties and skill decide the rest. Whether you may dig, build a raised bed or attach anything at all is not this course's to answer: if you rent, or live under an HOA or a community garden's rules, ask the landlord, association or coordinator in writing before you build, and keep the reply in your notebook. Before digging in the ground, contact 811 a few business days ahead; Ask the authority the free 811 service says planting a garden counts and that some utility lines are buried only inches deep.
2. See it See it
The two worked examples below use the course's fictional cases. Their frost dates, soil results and hose timings are invented for the examples; they are not lookups for any real place.
The Okafor garden sizes its week. Ada and Chidi Okafor have a suburban back yard, two children aged 6 and 9, and about 3 hours a week for a first garden. They have built two 4 x 8 ft cedar raised beds, 12 inches deep, on former lawn: 64 square feet in total. The hose spigot is 20 feet away. Their shortlist is tomato, pepper, bush bean, lettuce, cucumber and basil: six crops, inside the five to eight range.
They timed their hose with a 5-gallon pail: 66 seconds per fill. One inch-week over 64 square feet is 64 x 0.623 = 39.9 gallons, about 8 pail fills, which at 66 seconds each is about 8.8 minutes of hose time. In a week where their rain gauge showed 0.3 inch, 0.7 inch was still needed: 27.9 gallons, which is 27.9 / 5 x 66 = 368 seconds, about 6 minutes 8 seconds. Watering, even in a dry week, takes a small share of their 3 hours, so the rest is free for weeding the first weeks, a weekly scouting walk with the children, tying four tomatoes and picking.
The amounts check shows the brief is a starting size, not a supply plan. Four eaters, two of them children at about half an adult amount (Virginia's note), is about three adult portions. K-State's 3 to 5 tomato plants per person would be 9 to 15 plants. They planned 4 tomato plants at 24 inches in the east bed, because that is what fits beside the other five crops. They wrote that choice down rather than chasing the per-person figure.
- Known: 64 sq ft in two beds; about 3 hours a week; 66 seconds per 5-gallon pail; six crops; four eaters, two of them children.
- Assumed: that one inch a week is the right target for their beds (Minnesota Extension's convention; their own soil checks two inches down will confirm or correct it); that 3 hours holds in July, not just in May (their assumption).
- Open: whether the maple that shades the east bed after 4 pm from July cuts the tomato harvest. Their own harvest log settles it at season end. Whether the bed fill matches the supplier's description: the supplier's test results, which they have requested, settle it.
Marisol's balcony and the daily job. Marisol Vega rents an apartment with a west-facing balcony. She has six containers (two 10-gallon, two 5-gallon, two 2-gallon) and wants cherry tomato, pepper, lettuce, basil and radish: five crops, at the low end of the range, which suits six pots. She has about 1 hour a week for garden work, plus watering.
The week-of-work table changes shape for her. The one-inch rule does not apply; Penn State's at-least-daily watering in hot months does, and she carries the water in a 2-gallon can. Her weekly hour covers sowing radishes and lettuce in succession, scouting six pots and picking. The watering is a separate daily job of a few minutes that she cannot skip in July. When she asked herself what happens if she travels for a week in summer, the answer went into her brief: a neighbor she shares produce with will water.
- Known: six containers with a combined 34 gallons of capacity; five crops; about 1 hour a week plus daily watering in summer; water carried by can.
- Assumed: that the neighbor can water during her absences (her arrangement, to be confirmed with the neighbor).
- Open: the balcony's load limit for wet soil and containers. She asked the building owner in writing, and the owner settles it; she is not adding containers until the reply comes. Anything attached to the railing also needs the landlord's written OK under her lease. Whether 5 hours of afternoon sun is enough for the pepper: her own season settles it (Module 2).
Free sources that show the ideas on this page:
- Planning a Garden (Clemson HGIC 1256): site choice, sun and keeping the garden small enough to manage.
- Watering the vegetable garden (University of Minnesota Extension): the one-inch week, 62 gallons per 100 square feet and the pail test.
- Garden Journaling (Iowa State University Extension): what to record and why.
- Find Extension in Your State (Extension Foundation): the directory to your own state's extension service, the local authority this course points to throughout.
3. Practice Practice
Minimum: Measure the space, count your July hours, check the size against the table, write your goals and shortlist, then fill in the brief; skip the water timing and the one-week time log. Time: about 45 minutes, plus a few minutes on each of seven days to log time. Materials: a 5-gallon bucket (or any container with a known volume), a marker, a phone timer, a tape measure, the garden brief sheet on this site or a sheet of paper.
- Measure the space. Measure each bed, plot or container you have or plan to have. For beds and plots, multiply length by width in feet. For containers, write each one's volume in gallons (it is usually printed on the pot or the tag). Write the total area in the brief.
- Go deeper Time your water. Mark the 5-gallon line on a bucket if it is not marked. Run the hose the way you would water and time the fill. Repeat once and average. If you carry water, time one round trip with the can and note the can's size. Write the result in the water calculator or in your notes.
- Go deeper Work out a dry inch-week. Multiply your area by 0.623 for gallons, divide by 5 for pail fills, and multiply by your pail time. That is the minimum watering time in a week with no rain. For containers, write "daily in hot weather" and the minutes one round of watering takes.
- Find your July hours. Look at a July week in last year's calendar, or the coming one. Write the hours you could honestly give the garden each week, and which days. Note any trips longer than four days and who would water.
- Check the size against the table. Find your hours in the starting-size table above. If the space you have is bigger than the row suggests, decide now which part you will plant this year and which you will cover or leave in lawn. Write the decision and the reason in the brief.
- Write your goals. Choose up to three from setup's list (fresh eating, preserving, growing with children, growing one crop well, learning the method). For each, write one sentence about what it means for your garden.
- Build the shortlist. List every crop you would like to grow. Run each through the four filters (eaten weekly, light, space, effort) and cut to five to eight. Mark each crop "full sun" or "part shade tolerant" for Module 2.
- Ask what you need to ask. If you rent, live under an HOA or garden on a shared plot, write the question you need answered in writing (digging, a raised bed, a structure, a railing) and send it. Note the date sent. If you will dig in the ground, note when you will contact 811.
- Start the brief. Open the garden brief and fill every field: garden name, goals, weekly hours, space, total area, crop shortlist, who helps, and what would make the season a success, in your own words. Choose the same crops in setup.
- Go deeper Log one real week. Over the next seven days, write down the minutes you spend on anything garden-related, even if nothing is planted yet. It is the first entry in the notebook and the first real number for the "your time" row.
4. Your garden Your garden
5. Check your work Check your work
Criteria
- Is the total area written as a number, measured rather than estimated?
- Do you have a dry inch-week figure in gallons and in minutes, from your own hose or can timing?
- Are your weekly hours the hours you have in July, and do they cover the dry-week watering with time left for weeding, scouting and harvest?
- Does the size you will plant this year match the starting-size table, or do you have a written reason for differing?
- Is the shortlist five to eight crops, each one eaten weekly by someone in the household, each marked for its light need?
- Are amounts per person treated as a ceiling from a named source, not a target?
- If you rent or garden under rules, is the written question sent and dated?
- Is the brief filled in, including the sentence about what success looks like?
Worked example
Checked against the criteria, the Okafor brief (fictional) passes. The area is measured (64 sq ft). The dry inch-week is 39.9 gallons and 8.8 minutes from their own pail timing, a small share of 3 hours. The size matches the 3 to 5 hours row: two beds. Six crops, each one eaten weekly, with tomato, pepper, cucumber and bean marked "full sun," lettuce "part shade tolerant" and basil left to check in Module 2. They recorded 4 tomato plants as a space decision, not a per-person target. They own the house, so no written permission was needed. Their success sentence: "The kids pick something every week from June to September." The open items (maple shade, fill test results) are written with the person or record that settles each one.
Common mistakes
- Sizing for April hours. Spring weekends are not July weekdays. If your hours came from a free weekend, recount them for a working week in July.
- Treating the per-person table as a target. Planting 15 tomatoes because a table said so, in a garden with room for four, crowds every other crop. The table is a ceiling.
- Averaging two sources. K-State and Virginia disagree; averaging them produces a number neither published. Pick one, name it, and record what happened.
- Forgetting the daily job. Container gardeners who plan for a weekly hour and forget daily summer watering find out in the first heat wave.
- A shortlist of wishes. Crops nobody eats, or that need more room than the garden has, survive the list because they looked good in a catalog. The four filters exist to cut them.
- Building first, asking later. A raised bed the landlord asks you to remove in June costs the season. Ask in writing first.
What is still unresolved
This module cannot tell you whether your spot has enough sun for the crops on the list (Module 2 measures it), whether the soil is fit to grow food in (Module 3), or which growing method suits the space (Module 4). It cannot tell you how much the garden will produce; nothing can in advance, and the harvest log answers it at the end of the season. Plant counts and spacing are Module 5's. Whether the hours were right is settled by the weekly time log you started in the practice task: compare it with your estimate in late July, and adjust next year's brief.