🥕 Root Cellar (Storage) Garden Plan
Beets, carrots, onions, and potatoes for long-term storage.
Crops in this plan
| Crop | Plants per sq ft |
|---|---|
| Carrot | 16 |
| Beet | 9 |
| Onion | 9 |
| Potato | 1 |
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Enter your square footage and ZIP for plant counts and a frost-aware plan.
🥗 Salad Garden — 100 sq ft plan
Leafy greens, radishes, and quick crops for constant harvests all season.
| Crop | Space | Plants | Est. cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lettuce | 10 sq ft | 40 plants | $6.00 |
| Spinach | 10 sq ft | 40 plants | $6.00 |
| Carrot | 39 sq ft | 624 plants | $37.44 |
| Radish | 39 sq ft | 624 plants | $31.20 |
| Kale | 2 sq ft | 2 plants | $0.70 |
| Total | $81.34 | ||
Tip: Open the planting calendar or what to plant this week for dates. Get bed spacing or cost estimates.
Costs are typical retail estimates for seed packets/plants; spacing from extension guides. Actual results vary by variety, soil, and care.
Why this plan is laid out this way
The plan mixes crops at very different densities on purpose. Carrot is the tightest crop here at 16 plants per square foot, while Potato takes the most room at 1 per square foot. That spread is what makes a small bed productive: a crop like potato sets the vertical structure and the root volume it needs, and the leftover surface area between those plants is where the high-density, short-cycle crops earn their place. Interplanting a slow, wide crop with a fast, narrow one uses the same soil, water, and sun twice in a single season.
Working from the published days-to-harvest figures for these crops, the spread runs from about 55 days (Beet) to about 100 days (Onion). That difference of several weeks is what you plan around. A crop that finishes in a month and a half can be sown again in the space it vacated, and in a temperate climate that sequencing — not more bed space — is the main way to increase total harvest. It is also why a plan should be read as a calendar rather than a map: the same bed holds different crops in June and September.
Plants per bed size
The table multiplies this plan’s published per-square-foot densities by three common bed sizes, so you can see how the counts scale before you enter your own area in the planner above. Counts are rounded to whole plants.
| Crop | per sq ft | 16 sq ft | 32 sq ft | 64 sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carrot | 16 | 256 | 512 | 1024 |
| Beet | 9 | 144 | 288 | 576 |
| Onion | 9 | 144 | 288 | 576 |
| Potato | 1 | 16 | 32 | 64 |
For a 32-square-foot bed, that works out to about 1120 plants across 4 crops, and roughly $127.36 in seed and seedling cost at the retail estimates published in this plan. Treat the cost figure as an order of magnitude rather than a quote: prices move, and buying transplants instead of seed for the slowest crops can change the total substantially. The plant count is the number to trust, because it comes from spacing, and spacing is a horticultural constraint rather than a market price.
Season fit and light
Of the crops in this plan with published growing data, 0 are warm-season and 4 are cool-season, and 1 will tolerate part sun. That balance decides your calendar. Cool-season crops grow best in the shoulder seasons and decline or bolt once real heat arrives; warm-season crops stall in cold soil and cannot be pushed earlier than the soil allows, no matter how early the seed goes in. This plan is described as a full-sun plan, so site it accordingly — light is the one input you cannot fix with watering, fertilizer, or mulch, and a crop grown under the wrong light looks diseased when it is simply starved of energy.
Two planning habits make the difference between this plan working and not. Sow in succession rather than all at once — a few plants every two to three weeks gives a continuous harvest and insures against a single failed sowing, which matters most for the fast, leafy crops. And check your own frost dates before transplanting anything: the plan tells you what to grow and how densely, while the correct week to plant depends on your location, not the template. Use the ZIP lookup for your zone and frost dates, the planting calendar to date each crop, and the pest and host sheets once things are in the ground.
More garden plans
Spacing from extension guides; costs are retail estimates. Confirm with your seed packet and local conditions.