Thanks again Curtis I’ve been following you for many years. Really excited to be part of this community and movement. But some of my bed would get about 3-4 more hours of direct afternoon sunlight. Would I want single crop rotations such as tomatoes to be in my best beds as far as constant lighting is concerned? Or would it be more profitable to have high rotation crops? I live in Orange County California so I’m kinda lucky where I pretty much can grow anything anywhere during the summer. The baby boomer resistance is alive and cracking lol. No one gave a crap about their lawns prior to me buying my property. Also, the more developed my farm is becoming the more my neighbors are starting to reseed their lawns. My start up farm is very urban, more like your original content. It’s a little dicouraging seeing these mega market gardens. I’ll post my local GDD charts to instagram. GDD-5 is greater than 0 for early greens, GDD-10 > 0 for lettuce and turnips, GDD-18 for tomato fruiting etc. Then you can base your plan around the weeks where your crop’s GDD starts consistently going above 0 (GDD > 0). Asian greens start growing at 5deg, lettuce use Base 10 etc. The base temperature is the temp at which a crop does something awesome like grow or set fruit.
![excel garden planner excel garden planner](https://youshouldgrow.com/wp-content/uploads/Vegetable-garden-planning-spreadsheets.jpg)
The calculation of GDD is simple math, you can google it but basically it is Daily (Tmax -Tmin) – (Some base temperature Tbase).
#Excel garden planner series#
This is what the big Ag folks use for their farms, so why not us? With a little data wrangling on the interweb and Excel, anyone can download their local daily climate averages (as if anything is average these days) as well as time series of previous years and calculate their local crop GDD’s.
![excel garden planner excel garden planner](https://i.pinimg.com/600x315/3c/67/01/3c6701f3e81c783d2ab731abb5b19f32.jpg)
growing degree units or heat units) came up a lot. I dug around various online sources and the concept of Growing Degree Days (a.k.a. However, in trying to demystify your local DTM’s and yield projections for the shoulder season, there is a lot of basic plant science that could be added to the discussion. This really accelerated my crop planning process to the next level.