Gavin - Thanks for all your hard work!!
I am currently operating a CSA and looking for software to help plan it. Most of the available spreadsheets and websites are just glorified data entry tools rather than using software to do the heavy work. Yours has some great features that actually uses software to automate the plan. THANK YOU.
There is a lot to absorb and figure out your thought process and calculations. I've come across some things that I can't figure out;
- Number of CSA weeks offered starting at date and ending at date. How do I do that? the annual start and end dates do not seem to provide that functionality. If I need to offer a 35 week CSA starting on 6/18 and ending on 10/15 How do I limit that? It seems that an even more useful calculation would be to specify the harvest target weeks and have the spreadsheet calculate the seeding dates in order to deliver the crop on the harvest target dates. This sheet seems to tell me what is available even if I don't plan to harvest that crop that week. It seem backwards to what you need.
- Constraints seem to apply to both DS and TP plants. It may be better to incorporate the constraints on the DS and TP pages for the specific plants. The TP plants theoretically can be planted outside of the ideal conditions as they are started in the green house.
- Calendar is fantastic! I love how it tells you when to seed and when to transplant. I am not sure however if the planting that says plant 55 ft of cucumbers is 55 row feet or bed feet. Also on the field prep it outputs: Plant Cover Crop Group 202104B 460 ft what is the 202104B is that the YYYYMM(planting group?) or is the MM the bed number?
- Beds? In a market garden there are only so many beds available at x feet long. is there a way to determine at any given point in time how many TOTAL bed feet are required? or a constraint on total bed feet available and limit to that. This would help to know if you need to build more beds or cut back on crops.
Summary - My ideal would be to specify what plants I want to provide in the CSA. Specify the start date of CSA distribution and the last date of CSA distribution. Then specify number of Shares. Then the software would do the heavy lifting and calculate when to seed, plant in order to have the plants available for the CSA distribution. Total bed feet required and seed quantities.
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- I thought found how to change the dates for harvesting by putting zeros in the crops one the Weekly CSA Share content but I found that that tab is not included in any of the calculations for planting or for seed calculations. All the planting and seed requirements are based on output sheets and not on input sheets. I would thing that using the Weekly CSA share content and adjust the planting schedule and seed requirements on that would be useful.
Gavin thanks again for sharing this! it is great work.
Mark
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