Why Garden Plans Rarely Survive Spring explains why garden planning fails once spring growth begins. This video breaks down why spring gardening exposes problems in even the best vegetable garden plans, long after winter decisions were made.
Gardens behave very differently once growth starts. Spring does not continue your plan. It tests it. If your garden slips out of control early every year, this will help you understand why it keeps happening.
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GrowTrack was built for this exact problem. Not as another planner, but as a way to manage a garden as it actually behaves, with memory, context, and feedback over time.
00:00 Why Garden Plans Rarely Survive Spring
02:13 Why winter garden planning creates false confidence
02:56 How soil history affects spring growth
03:22 Managing a garden as a living system
05:03 What spring gardening reveals about soil and timing
05:22 Why spring tests your garden plan
08:37 Why vegetable garden problems appear after a strong start
10:12 Why gardens fall out of control early
10:27 What garden planning never accounts for
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15 Comments
"Everybody has a garden plan until they put seeds in the soil." – Not Mike Tyson
Thank you🙏
Interesting video Tony got me thinking in different ways thank you for your time and knowledge!
What a brilliant analysis!
I've winter dug and manured. Later I will lime to get ph about right. Then, I'll plant and adjust as the season moves along.
The living garden must work hand in hand with the living plants in a sort of symbiote way. Lesson learned.
Thanks Tony.
Interesting video from a knowledgeable gardener
Plan??? I do purely reactive gardening. 😜
Thank you for sharing all this information with us.
I have only being gardening for four years, and every year has being totally different.
I try to be observant of what is happening in the garden. I am learning that soil is top of list of importance. An on going process of feeding the soil.
All what you said makes a lot of sense.
I am still learning, but I love the challenge of trying difference things and I have learnt a lot that way.
A question Tony. ??
When you are getting all your ingredients to start a new compost. The kitchen scraps for instance. Do you store them in a closed bucket with holes on the bottom of the container, so the liquid can drain into the soil or not?
I did experiment after I discovered if I left holes on l the bottom of the drum and did layers of coffee grounds between the kitchen scraps, the earthworms finished the breaking it down.
I bought some bags of sheep manure from a friend who has cattle, sheep and horses.
I put the sleep manure in a containers with holes at the bottom, earthworms and soldier flies larvae broke it down beautifully.
🌿💚🌿
Great video Tony and excellent advice as always.
I'm not much of a planner. Don't get me wrong…I'm proficient in my gardening, but my methods would drive lots of folks nuts. For example, even though I know which tomato varieties grow well here, when I start my seeds, I normally just mark em 'i' for indeterminate, and maybe 's' for sauce, and that's about it. I've never been to a restaurant and asked what variety of tomatoes they're serving today, so I simply don't see the point. I'm a chaotic gardener I guess you might say, even though my garden is well kept
Nature cannot be captured in a schedule! Phenology can be a guide! We have forgotten how to observe nature, which tells us what needs to happen! Thanks again.
Da iawn! Plants usually catch up.
All of that to say gardening is not 100% predictable, but it certainly is somewhat predictable, and based on experience, one can mitigate most issues. The experienced gardener knows that anything unexpected can happen–late freeze, hail on a warm day, very hot for days on end, tornado (or high winds), a new disease, animal predation, etc. Experienced gardeners even can mitigate such events as well. Backup disease resistant crops, fences, wind blocks, shade cloth, container gardening, repeat planting. This is all part of planning. Some of us even say, "If it happens, then move on to something else and let go." as part of the plan. The more one gardens, the more one will be successful at it. It is both a science and an art. My suggest is watch what your garden does and learn from anything that happens, then adjust. Research must be part of the learning and an understanding that nothing will ever be perfect, but it's part of the deal.
"No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. ". Von Moltke
❤👍
"A wise plan bends like bamboo — strong in purpose, but flexible in the wind of change."
Don't know who said that, but it kind of sums up my gardening plan. Continually modified based on observation.
Great video Tony. Cheers!