Five questions, then a planting plan you can print and follow:
what to buy, when to sow it, and where each thing goes in the bed.
Where are you growing?
Everything downstream is dates, and dates come from frost.
A zone is a winter number. It describes how cold your coldest night
gets, which decides what survives the winter — and everything in a summer
garden is planted and finished inside one year. What actually matters is
your last spring frost, so that is what the zone is converted into
below. It is an average: a hilltop and the valley under it can differ by
two or three weeks. If you know your real date, set it.
What do you actually eat?
Pick what you'd genuinely be pleased to have a lot of. Nothing else earns its space.
How big is the bed?
One rectangle. If you have several, plan the biggest first — you can run this again.
Width runs left to right on the plan, depth runs away from you.
Keep the depth to about 4 ft if it is a raised bed — that is as far as
most people can reach in from an edge.
The plan puts the tallest plants along the top edge — set the bed out so
that top edge points north and nothing shades anything behind it.