Spring is nearly upon us!
Spring is nearly upon us and its high time to start thinking about planting seeds, if you haven’t already started doing so already. To remember all the dates for all the different plants, I made a Farming Calculator years ago that I’m sharing with everyone here. Now is a great time to be starting those tomato, pepper, eggplant, ground cherry and sunberry seeds to get a jump on the season and an early summer harvest. Don’t get behind just as the season starts!
Gardening/Farming Calculators and CSA Calculators generally cover when to start seeds, how much seed is needed and yield expectations. Mine is a bit more than that…
There are many farming calculators available online for a cost, and many as well for free. Here’s a list from Cornell Small Farms Program featuring Johnny’s Selected Seeds’ Seed Calculator, a nitrogen calculator, a grass-fed beef decision calculator, comparison of rental rates for landowners calculator, and water soil calculators.
Hermione’s Free Farming Calculator
When I started my own farm in 2012 I spent that first winter making my own farming calculator. I wasn’t content with Johnny’s Selected Seeds’ Seeds Calculator and wanted to make something that worked for me. I found a free CSA Calculator from Virginia State University (I think) which is no longer available. This calculator was created by Theresa J. Nartea, extension agribusiness & marketing specialist, using data from Dr. Keith Baldwin, extension horticulture specialist (Laurel Springs CSA Research Project 2002-2005).
Version 1.0
I’m including my earliest version of altering her CSA Calculator, which includes Theresa’s instructions on how to use it. This first version of mine included growing information on various grains I was hoping to try planting, something that is really not readily available elsewhere from what I’ve found. This version is more basic than my 3.0 version, but includes:
- Customizable harvest amount, cull rate, additional plants to account for possible loss.
- Enter specific dates from seed packets for Days to Maturity
- First seed inside dates, transplant age recommendation and date for transplanting outside, first seed outside dates
- Customize how many weeks of harvest per crop you want to account for out of those possible for the season
- Plants needed per season
- Customizable square footage calculator by crop
- Season broken down into plantings, customize how many you want per crop, then get the square foot needed per planting
- Customize how many seeds you prefer to plant (I do 3) per expected plant, then get how many seeds needed total for the season and per planting
Here is a screenshot from Theresa’s instructions. Follow this link to get csacalculatorversiondraft of the Farming Calculator.
Version 3.0
I’ve done a lot with the CSA Calculator Theresa Nartea offered, here is one of my later versions. This version includes all of the capabilities of the earlier version, but with more detail (maybe too much) and options.
- You can change the planting dates to correspond to your growing zone, mine is set to Zone 5.
- The calculator can be set for different CSA share numbers and you can toy with the amount of each crop you give to share holders.
- If you want to just grow for your family, enter 1 at the top after “Enter Number of Full Shares” for a 4 person family, and .5 for a 2 person family.
- I’ve included cull rates and additional plants to try to account for natural loss
- There is first seed inside dates, days to maturity, transplant age recommendation, first transplant dates for outside, and for first seeding outside date.
- For harvest we have first harvest date, last harvest date, season length and weeks of shares for that crop per season.
- If you go to the tabs at the bottom you will find one for Harvest Date Guide you will find a more thorough breakdown of harvest times for each planting and crop.
- I’ve included planting seed spacing as well by plants per square feet, which then gives you the square feet needed for each crop!
- You can enter how many plantings per season per crop you’d like to do, and break this down to square feet per planting and plants needed per planting.
- You can enter how many seeds you prefer to sow per plant. I generally do 3—one for the bird, one for the bug, and one for the farmer. From there it will give you the number of seeds needed total for all the plantings you want to do in the growing season for each crop.
Here is a screenshot of the input page, follow this link to my CSA Calculator 3.0 Both versions are open to editing and sharing with others!
Please feel free to download, alter, and share what you do with this CSA Growing Calculator! If you find some corrections (I’m sure there needs to be some) please send me a corrected version or improved versions that you may create!
