Community Garden Rotation and Harvest Planner
Coordinate crop rotation, equitable bed assignments, and compost production for a shared community garden. Enter the number of beds, bed size, rotation cycle, household participation, and composting cadence to see if your garden will meet harvest goals while keeping soil healthy year after year.
| Year | Fruiting crops | Leafy & brassicas | Roots & legumes | Resting / cover |
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Why community gardens need a rotation planner
Community gardens thrive on coordination. Most plots are managed by volunteers who juggle work schedules, family events, and seasonal weather shifts. When a garden lacks a shared plan, beds can be overworked, crops are repeated in the same spot, and participation drops as harvests disappoint. At the same time, the internet is filled with inspirational garden photos but thin on calculators that convert square footage, crop yields, rotation cycles, and composting capacity into a cohesive plan. The Community Garden Rotation and Harvest Planner brings those pieces together. It translates your garden’s layout into equitable bed assignments, estimates whether planned crops will meet food goals, and checks that soil health tasks stay on track.
Many gardens cobble together rotation advice from books and local extension bulletins, but those resources often assume a single gardener managing a small backyard. Shared gardens must balance fairness and soil science. This planner highlights how many productive beds each household can steward, how resting plots affect harvest totals, and how much compost you need to close nutrient loops. It complements operational tools such as the community tool library utilization planner by making sure garden equipment is backed by enough produce to justify the effort. When it is time to organize watering schedules or infrastructure upgrades, you can cross-reference insights from the street tree watering rotation planner to keep volunteer workloads reasonable across green projects.
By inviting members to plug in their own assumptions, the planner supports participatory governance. You can model what happens if more households join mid-season, see the impact of dedicating extra beds to cover crops, or test whether intensively managed beds with higher yields can relieve the pressure on compost teams. The results include both textual summaries and rotation tables to spark discussion at garden meetings.
How the harvest and rotation calculations work
The planner starts by separating productive beds from those resting or planted with soil-building cover crops. Multiplying productive beds by average bed size yields the total square footage available for harvest crops. That figure, combined with an expected yield per square foot, produces an estimate of annual harvest. The tool then compares this to the aggregate goal across all participating households. If yields fall short, you can either increase productivity, add beds, or adjust expectations.
In MathML notation, expected harvest is calculated as:
where is the number of productive beds after accounting for rest periods, is average bed size in square feet, and is expected yield per square foot. The calculator guards against zero or negative inputs and keeps the resting percentage between 0 and 40 so the rotation cycle still has active plots. Beds per household are determined by dividing productive beds by the number of households and rounding to two decimals so groups can make fair assignments without splitting a bed into impractical slivers.
Rotation tables assume three primary crop families—fruiting, leafy/brassica, and roots/legumes—plus the portion resting in cover crops. The planner spreads productive beds across the selected rotation length by distributing the total as evenly as possible. It then shifts the allocations each year so that a bed occupied by tomatoes in year one moves to brassicas in year two, legumes in year three, and rest in year four when applicable. Even if your garden uses more specialized crop groupings, the proportional approach makes it easy to scale. You can always swap labels to match specific guilds or add signage that maps each bed to its assigned column.
Worked example
Consider a garden with 24 raised beds averaging 48 square feet each. Eighteen households share the space. The garden collective wants a four-year rotation cycle with 20 percent of beds resting under cover crops each year. Members hope to harvest 160 pounds of produce per household annually, and experience suggests that intensive organic practices can deliver about 1.2 pounds per square foot. Each bed needs roughly 60 pounds of finished compost per year to maintain fertility. Volunteers schedule three compost-building sessions per month, producing 45 pounds of finished compost each time.
Entering those numbers yields 19.2 productive beds (24 × 0.8) and 921.6 square feet in production. Expected harvest is about 1,105 pounds, slightly below the 2,880-pound target needed to supply 160 pounds to each household. The summary flags a deficit of 1,775 pounds, prompting a conversation about adding succession plantings, partnering with another garden, or adjusting goals. Each household is allocated 1.07 productive beds on average, which can be translated into alternating primary and secondary caretaking roles. Compost demand totals 1,440 pounds annually (24 beds × 60 pounds). Volunteer sessions produce 1,620 pounds (45 × 3 × 12), leaving a comfortable surplus for mulch or distribution to neighboring gardeners.
The rotation table shows year one with 6 beds of fruiting crops, 6 beds of leafy crops, 7 beds of roots and legumes, and 5 beds resting. In year two those assignments shift forward: the fruiting beds move into leafy crops, leafy beds rotate into roots and legumes, and so on. The resting beds rejoin production after a season off. Seeing the distribution in a table helps coordinators label plots, design signage, and communicate expectations during spring orientation.
Scenario comparison
The planner also populates a dynamic comparison table in the results area that contrasts your current plan with two alternatives: an aggressive harvest scenario that reduces resting beds, and a soil-rebuilding scenario that expands rest periods. Leaders can print or screenshot these results to bring into meetings, ensuring that adjustments consider both productivity and long-term soil health.
| Scenario | Productive beds | Expected harvest (lb) | Compost balance (lb) |
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Limitations and assumptions
Every garden has microclimates, pest pressures, and soil histories that a spreadsheet cannot fully capture. The planner assumes an average yield per square foot, but actual results will vary with rainfall, heat waves, irrigation quality, and cultivar selection. Intensive practices like vertical trellising or season extension tunnels can push yields far beyond the baseline; conversely, drought or disease can drop them. Treat the calculator as a planning baseline, then update inputs each year with real harvest logs to improve accuracy.
Compost calculations presume that all material produced is usable and applied evenly. In reality you may need to cure compost longer, sift out uncomposted debris, or share surplus with nearby gardens. The rotation schedule also assumes that all beds are equal size and equally accessible. If some beds are shaded, narrower, or dedicated to perennials, adjust the inputs to reflect only the annual vegetable beds under rotation. Finally, the tool does not enforce specific crop families; it simply provides a framework. Garden leadership should tailor the categories to match what they actually plant and adapt the plan to emerging needs, much like the adaptability encouraged by the block party budget and volunteer planner for community events.