SSFS Farm Blog Oct. 2025: The Layout

By Francis Zell '00, SSFS Farmer Educator

Oct. 7, 2025

In general, we don’t have a very long attention span these days.  Want to research something?  Get instant results on the internet!  Need to know how something works?  There’s a YouTube “short” for that.  And don’t even get me started on AI!  Over the years, we have gotten pretty accustomed to taking shortcuts and expecting instant... everything!

Growing produce sure is a change of pace!  The radishes we planted will take at least 40 days and that's like rocket speed in the growing world!  The lettuce, two weeks longer.  The onions, which several grades in the Lower School planted last week, won’t be ready until late May at the earliest as “spring” onions and even then won't bulb until a few weeks later.  And  the garlic going in this week won't be ready for harvest until mid July!  Then, it has to dry for three weeks before you can use it. That's right, growing garlic requires 10 months of patience!

During that time a lot can happen. Pests can invade, diseases can move in, weather can change dramatically. Heck, the average lower schooler outgrew their shoes at least twice! It can be pretty unnerving, and nothing is a sure thing. So it's important that all of our farm tasks are done thoroughly and deliberately with thought and care for the future in mind to give our plants and our farm as much of a chance of success as possible. There’s a pretty good life lesson hidden in there somewhere if you ask me!

But of all the garden tasks, none bear more responsibility and consideration than the initial layout of a new garden design. We want standardization for a reason. All beds are 50’ long and 30” wide with an 18” path.   Each set of beds, or blocks, needs an 8’ wide path for tractor or cart access. We can get into the reasoning for that more in a future post, but the crucial math game becomes how to most efficiently lay out as many beds and access paths as possible, while maintaining a workflow that makes sense and is conducive to a large group of people safely moving about at the same time.  

Getting control of the weeds and initially prepping the hilled beds takes hours of labor and quite literally hundreds of tons of inputs like wood chips and compost. It’s a task that needs to be done well the first time because redoing it- well - it would suck!  Our garden is especially challenging because it’s not square, or one shape even.  It’s like four different shapes, but all lacking true 90 degree angles. Satellite imagery from above easily shows the difficulty of laying this space out with some sense of standardization.

Enter the 6th grade. They formed five different groups and visited the farm during their math classes to measure the perimeter of the fence and sketch out the garden. From there, they are going to come up with proposals of how to lay out as many beds as possible but still allow for tractor access, human visitor flow, and tool storage. After their designs are submitted to me, I will look at them with my Upper Schooler Farming for Fitness students, who have spent more time working there than anyone else, and also show 4th and 5th graders to see what they like. We may choose one design, or elements of each in the ultimate layout which I will run by a few people who do this for a living that I know before finally coming in with the heavy equipment.

The final decision actually needs to be made rather quickly- on October 17, Community Day,  we are going to have about 50 students out there shoveling wood chips, laying cardboard paths and adding compost!  Once the beds are made, we (and the plants) have to live with it, so we better get it right the first time.

[Photo below taken on Community Day, Oct. 17]