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The quickest way to plan a bed or a border. Onions at 10 cm square give 100 a square metre; potatoes at 30 cm give 11.

Every bed plan starts with this. A 10 m bed with rows 30 cm apart has 33 rows, and at 25 cm in the row that is about 1,300 plants.

Measure around the chest just behind the front legs (heart girth) and from the point of shoulder to the pin bone (body length), both in centimetres. Square the girth, multiply by length, divide by 300. Best for cattle; less accurate for very fat or very thin stock.

How much compost to barrow across the plot. One wheelbarrow is about 60 litres, so a 10 m2 bed at 5 cm needs about 5 barrows.

The jack, the brake press, the loader bucket and the post hole rammers. A 10 cm piston moved with 100 N will lift 1,000 kg on a 1 m piston.

Turn a spacing into a population, then into a seed rate. Work out what you want first, and the drill setting second.

Lime is the one thing you cannot take back once it is spread, so use a buffer test rather than a pH test. See Soil Ph And Lime.

To work out how long it takes to drill a field, how much fuel you will burn, or how much fertiliser to put on through the drill.

Bed planning. Work out how many plants you want, divide the bed area by the number, and that is the space each one gets.

How to keep a small bed productive all season. Sow little and often, and swap a fast crop for a slow one when the space frees up.

For beans, beetroot, carrots and onions sown in a drill in a bed. Sowing three seeds in a station and taking the best one is often more reliable.