What Season Are You Designing For?

Designing for stewardship, not just spring enthusiasm

Over the last few weeks, I have been creating planting plans for two urban agriculture demonstration gardens. There are many things to consider: crop varieties, crop rotation, intercropping, companion planting, and succession planting. Before all of those you must ask: What season are you designing for?

Where I live, you can grow in all four seasons, but in these demonstration gardens we focus on three – spring (cool), summer (warm), and fall (cool).

Designing for three seasons sounds simple. There a countless grow calendars that illustrate what to plant and harvest throughout the year. But when I ask, “What season are you designing for?” I am not talking about the calendar.

Each season carries a different energy, requires a different maintenance mindset, and attracts a different level of volunteer engagement.

Spring is aspirational.

Winter rest allows us to forget most of last season’s challenges (it’s hard to forget the pesky deer). Seedlings are growing on windowsills. Seed packets have been selected. Volunteers return. Beds are cleared of winter. Cool season crops like lettuce, peas, radishes, and kale reward us quickly. Pent-up winter energy propels people outside to enjoy warmth and fresh air. Spring is about possibility and it is easy to get swept up in the potential.

Summer is abundant – and relentless.

Tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash. Heat, weeds, drought, pests. Vacation schedules thin volunteer crews. Demonstration gardens that felt vibrant in May can feel strained by July designed without a maintenance mindset.

Fall is reflective.

Cool temperatures return. The light softens. There is space to evaluate what worked, what failed, and what to try next year. Fall can be deeply productive – if we still have the energy to plant and nurture it.

Often we design with Spring in mind – full of possibility – and inadvertently overcommit for summer. By the time fall arrives, fatigue (and sometimes full on burnout) has set in, and there is simply nothing left to give.

As a Master Gardener and someone who thinks about food systems at multiple scales, I have come to see planting plans as infrastructure documents. They are not just crop lists sort by cool and warm seasons; they are statements about labor, water, energy, and expectations.

If we design only for abundance, we exhaust our stewards.

If we design for long-term stewardship, abundance follows in its own time.

Burnout rarely begins in August.

It begins in April — when we say yes to more than July can carry.

The garden is honest. It reveals the gap between aspiration and capacity.

So I’ll ask again:

What season are you designing for — the one that excites you now, or the one that will test you later?

And if you designed for the test instead of the excitement, what might you plant differently?