Standardize every bed before you plant a thing
Sample video: in the live course this plays the full walkthrough.
If you take one thing from the first module, take this: decide on a single bed size and never deviate from it. It sounds almost too small to matter. It's actually the decision that quietly makes, or breaks, every system that comes after it. Standardise your beds first, and the rest of the farm falls into place. Skip it, and you'll be re-measuring, re-cutting, and improvising for years.
Why one size changes everything
When every bed is identical, everything you own fits every bed. A tarp cut once covers any bed. A length of drip line reaches end to end on every bed. A tray of transplants spaced for your bed width plants any bed. Your crop plan stops being "how much space does this need?" and becomes "how many beds does this need?": a number you can actually count and schedule. Standardisation turns a fuzzy plot into a countable grid.
The numbers most growers settle on
A common, proven bed standard
- 30 inches (75 cm) wide. Narrow enough to reach the middle from either side without stepping on the soil: the whole point of no-till is never compacting the growing area.
- A fixed length: often 50 or 100 feet. Pick one and repeat it. A fixed length makes seeding rates, row covers, and drip runs identical every time.
- Paths of 12–18 inches (30–45 cm). Wide enough to kneel, harvest, and wheel a cart; no wider, or you're paying in wasted ground.
- Permanent beds and permanent paths. You always walk the paths and never the beds. The soil in the bed stays loose and alive; the path takes all the traffic.
The exact numbers matter less than the discipline of choosing once and holding to it. If your tools or your site suggest a slightly different width, fine, but then every bed is that width, forever.
The temptation is to make "just this one bed" a bit wider to fit an awkward corner, or a bit longer to use up space. Don't. The first non-standard bed is where the system starts leaking: now one tarp doesn't fit, one drip run is short, one seeding count is off. Protect the standard even when it costs you a little ground. The consistency is worth far more than the square footage.
Before you plant anything, write down your farm's standard in one line: bed width, bed length, and path width. Then walk your plot and mark how many whole standard beds actually fit. That single count, the number of beds you have, is the foundation every later lesson plans against.
What the standard buys you
This is the pay-off. Once every bed is the same, a bed stops being an area you have to think about and becomes a number you can order against. Put your own standard in and see what one bed actually holds.
Course tool
Bed plant and seed calculator
Your standard bed, turned into a plant count and a seed order.
300 plants
3 rows at 12 in spacing, down one 100 ft bed.
Order about 389 seeds per bed at 85% germination.
100 ft is 1,200 in, ÷ 12 in = 100 per row, × 3 rows.
Bed length divided by spacing gives plants per row, times your number of rows. Order more seed than plants, because not every seed comes up.
- Whole plants only, so we round down. You cannot plant two thirds of a lettuce.
- Rule of thumb: the seed figure adds 10% on top of your germination rate for thinning and losses. The rate itself comes off your packet, never from us.
Next, in the paid modules, we'll take that standard and lay out a whole quarter-acre around it: sun, water, access, and the paths that make daily work fast.