Some overall guidance would help:
- crops or flowers or both? Shrubs? Landscaping?
- do you want rows and rows filling a big field, or scattered, small raised beds, or foundation plantings or ...?
- advice for a beginner or an experienced gardener?
- low-maintenance, low-cost, low-water-usage, or a retiree's pride and joy and major hobby?
- starting with fertile, well-drained soil, or sand, or clay, or ??
- level ground, slight slope, or on a grade?
- Sunny, or mostly partly shaded?
- long, dry, hot summer? How cold does an unusually cold winter get?
- (I'm guessing that drought-tolerance is key. Will you irrigate?)
I like narrow raised beds so I can reach the whole width of the bed from one side - say, 3-4 feet wide.
If you have multiple beds or many rows, you still need to be able to get a wheelbarrow fairly near each row. maybe the gap between every other bed, or every 5th row, is wide enough for a wheelbarrow.
If you make a bed longer than, say, 15-20 feet, consider partly burying a cinder block every 10-15 feet in the bed, as a stepping-stone, so you can step OVER the bed and get to the other side without walking all the way around.
Plant together things that have similar water requirements.
If you will be following a spring crop with a summer crop (or adding a Fall crop in the same bed after the summer things are winding down), try to plan so that you can cultivate, add compost and re-plant a whole section around the same time. Try not to have just a few plants hanging on for 2 more months after everyth8ng else int hat area has finished up.
Try to plant tall things (pole beans) along the north edge of a garden, where they won't throw as much shade onto shorter things.
If you plan to save seeds, remember what cross-pollinates what. When one thing bolts and starts to put out flowers, you'll not want a bunch of plants of the same species but a different cultivar NEARBY and bolting at the same time. Gardeners saving seeds for themselves don't need 99.9% pollen purity. 90% is fine and 80% is practical. You're "just" growing food, not acting as a global seed bank or seed conservancy.
If you ARE hoping to save "pure" seeds of some rare heirloom crop or flower "for future generations", you'll have to plan for long isolation distances or use bags to keep insects away from the plants you save seed from.
If you're a novice gardener, start small so you don't get frustrated.
You might have to spend more time (at first) cultivating the soil than cultivating plants, until you get your soil up to "fairly fertile". Invest in compost or build a BIG compost heap! And after seedlings have emerged, cover with coarse mulch to keep soil cooler and prevent water from evaporating as rapidly.
Focus on choosing a few crops that you LIKE to eat, or flowers that you think are pretty.
But if you're just starting gardening, plant mostly EASY crops or flowers until you get some experience.
If there are things that you like that most people think are hard to grow in your area, try only a few kinds of them per year so you aren't disappointed when those all die the first few years.
And always have SOME easy plants in the schedule, so that you always have SOME successes, which will teach you what works and what doesn't, as the "easy" plants suffer or thrive as you improve what they need most.
Each year that you kill a bunch of crops, you LEARN a bunch of things. Eventually you'll be the only person for miles in any direction who can grow those things!
All that said, I'll admit my own bias. What would it be like to PLAN a garden ahead of time???
I may have done that once or twice out of extreme necessity to shoehorn in many things I wanted to collect seeds from, but those plans all went for naught when I had to remove that entire bed!
Generally, I have many more seedlings than I have square feet, and things go wherever there is room.
PLANNING ... planning. Planning! Hunnh. I guess some people DO plan!
