My Simple Small Vegetable Garden Planning Ideas

If you’re looking for small vegetable garden ideas, you’re in the right place.

You may wonder what’s necessary, what’s not, and how to get organized for planting. I live in a townhouse and 100 percent of my garden is in vertical GreenStalk planters. My garden is not fancy or spacious but I grow over 150 crops season after season.

Let me help you with ideas for a small garden!

1. Here’s where I keep my gardening supplies

Yup, it’s in a corner of my living room. I also have several indoor composters and two totes under the bed with supplies.

2. Here’s an inventory of my small space essential gardening supplies

Soil test capsules for pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium levels. Neem oil for battling mildew and a spray bottle.

A vinyl apron for heavier chores like power washing.

Mini trellises for my planter pockets.

GreenStalk gardening journals.

Copies of Farmer’s Almanac.

Seed starting and seed saving guides, other references like this moon calendar, and instructions.

Various hand and neck fans.

Paint brushes for hand pollination.

A pH and moisture meter.

3. What, where, and when to plant crops

The options and methods you use have to make sense for the size of your garden.

I’ll show you three and one will likely work for you. When I started I didn’t know what to do or when to start planting, frost dates, or how long things took to grow. I started with a spreadsheet.

Spreadsheet

This has columns for your crops, crop dates, germination time, succession dates, and harvest dates. After several seasons of inputting info, it all started to make sense.

Gardening journals

I loved using these GreenStalk garden journals. It’s a simple, unfussy method to document what you planted, grew, and harvested in each tier. If you have three or fewer planters, like GreenStalk planters, stick with the journals.

The Seedtime app

For a larger garden, you need a new method of gardening documentation to know what to do during specific times of the year, such as pruning, fertilizing, and pest control.

This is where the Seedtime app comes in handy. Just put in your zip code and it helps you plan your gardening for your growing zone.

Click schedule and it populates a schedule for you to follow. You can plan your garden in minutes, not hours. Full-fledged farmers and homesteaders use this app! All you need is a basic plan on this app.

4. My GreenStalk garden

As I got more confident, I started growing in GreenStalk planters and expanded my crops. It’s all under 2 square feet and it’s a mobile garden on wheels.

I now have a total of five of these vertical planters. That’s a total of 150 pockets of things growing.

5. Starting seeds indoors

When my seeds arrive, I sort and organize them in my seed photo box.

6. Seed starting materials

I keep my seed-starting materials, heating mats, and growing lights in our basement in slender totes.

I have a ton of other supplies like seed starting pellets in more baskets in the basements.

7. Worm bins

I have several worm bins. I have made my own worm castings for years.

It’s a quick 5-minute weekly routine that lets me generate over 200 pounds of high-humus compost for my garden using just my kitchen scraps.

They are odorless and help generate castings every six to eight weeks. This helps me reduce and quit my reliance on purchased fertilizer.

8. Collapsible racks for seeds

I love these racks for multiple seed-starting trays. All you do is snap the trays into place on the rack.

9. Seed starting containers

My containers are always a combination of biodegradable pots or peat pots. These pots let me tear off the plants when it’s time to transplant them without disturbing the roots.