Making Your Own Sunstick to Quickly and Accurately Find Your Sunniest Spot

Just as Easy but Twice as Useful

This is my favorite method for siting a garden. It’s more precise but not any more difficult than any of the other methods and has many handy uses. The small amount of preparation is very user-friendly and can be accomplished in just a few minutes. And once this straightforward prep work is done, the resulting tool you create allows you to find the sunniest location for a garden in minutes.

The math and charts have already been done, so all you have to do is pick which height is closest to yours and put the lines and labels on a stake, hoe, or the like. As easy as that is, the resulting “sun stick” will allow you to measure the degrees of your local obstructions, and, knowing these, you’ll be able to look up the exact amount of direct sunlight your spot receives at any time of year in the charts provided.

Make Your Stick

First, make your stick.

Find a Stick, Stake, Rake, Hoe, or Shovel

Grab a stick, stake, or garden implement that is at least four feet long. It will be a little easier to use if it’s four-to-five feet long or more, but four feet will still work. You can use a rake, hoe, tomato stake, or garden stake. It can be thick or thin. Anything, really, will work, but it’s a bit easier if it’s lighter, since you’ll be walking around your prospective garden site holding it out in front of you for a few minutes.

Pick Your Height and Label Your “Sun Stick”

Your stick’s measurements vary based on your height and arm length, so first pick the height below that is closest to yours, so you can get the most accurate measurements.

If you’re closer to 6 feet tall:
An inch or so from one end, make a dark line with a marker and label it “50º” (see diagram below). Then, from the 50º line, measure nine-and-a-half inches, make a line, and label it “40º.” Next, from the 50º line, measure 16½ inches, make a line, and label it “30º.” Finally, continue down the stick, making lines at 22 inches, labeled “20º”; at 27 inches, labeled “10º”; at 32 inches, labeled “0º”; and at 40 inches, labeled “Hand.”

If you’re closer to 5 feet, 4 inches tall:
An inch or so from one end, make a dark line with a marker and label it “50º” (see diagram below). Then, from the 50º line, measure eight-and-a-half inches, make a line, and label it “40º.” Next, from the 50º line, measure 14½ inches, make a line, and label it “30º.” Finally, continue down the stick making lines at 19½ inches, labeled it “20º”; at 23½ inches, labeled it “10º”; at 27½ inches, labeled “0º”; and at 33½ inches, labeled “Hand.”

Use Your Stick

Now it’s time for the fun part!

Knowing your cardinal and ordinal directions, grab your newly made sunstick and a notepad and head to the area you’d like to be a garden.

Grasp the stick so that the top of your hand aligns with the line that says “Hand.” Hold the stick straight out in front of you, arm fully extended, with your hand at about the same height as your shoulder. The mark for 0º should be about at your eye level, and the 50º mark should be near the top of the stick. Sighting through the 0º mark is where the true horizon is—where the sun is at the time of the official sunrise and where your horizon would be were you not to have any obstructions from trees, hills, mountains, or buildings.

Move to the eastern edge of your prospective garden plot and point your body, arm, and stick to the northeast as described above (see Why Northeast and Northwest Instead of Just East and West?). Sight through the stick to the tops of your northeasterly obstructions and note the degrees they correspond with on your stick. That’s the degree of your obstructions to the northeast, where the sun will rise in June. Record the degrees for the northeast on your notepad. Do the same to the east, southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest.

Be sure to move to the south side of your garden while pointing south and to the west side while pointing west and northwest. Moving to the south and, especially, the west lets you know when that side of your garden will first be in shade. Were you to face west from the east side of your garden, you’d be just finding out when the east side will be in shade, which, all things being equal, is the last side to get shade in the afternoon. To illustrate this point, move around your garden plot with the stick held in front of you for a bit and you’ll see what drastically different readings you’ll get depending on where you stand while pointing in a direction.

Consult the Charts

Finally, use your recorded degrees of obstructions to find the amount of direct sunlight your spot receives.

Choose the chart for the latitude that is closest to yours and use your degrees of obstruction to find the hours of direct sunlight for your spot during the times of year you’ll be growing a garden.

25º North Latitude (e.g. Miami; Brownsville, TX)
30º North Latitude (e.g. Jacksonville, New Orleans, Houston)
35º North Latitude (e.g. Charlotte, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Los Angeles)
40º North Latitude (e.g. Philadelphia; Columbus, OH; Springfield, IL; Lincoln, NE; Denver; Reno)
45º North Latitude (e.g. Bangor, ME; Montpelier; Ottowa; Minneapolis; Billings, MT; Portland, OR)
50º North Latitude (e.g. St. Johns, NL; Winnipeg; Calgary)

A Method with Perks

This method has lots of perks.

Using the stick and the charts, in a short time anyone can expertly site a garden by moving a little forward or backward to find the best or most tolerable angle of their obstructions, locating the most ideal locations for the eastern, western, and southern edges of their garden.

Plus, these tools can help even the savviest gardener who’s been gardening in the same area for quite a while. In fact, any gardener is likely to learn something about his or her garden site each time he or she uses it. I know I do.

Most recently, for example, using the stick, I discovered a couple of small trees had sprung up in an adjacent meadow to the point where they were significant obstructions, increasing the angle of my obstructions to the east much higher than I liked. Even though I’m in that area all the time, before I used the stick and charts, I never would have guessed they had decreased the amount of sun on my plants as severely as they had. Trees grow quickly. It happens. But, once I saw empirically how much sun they were blocking, I could no longer overlook the extent of their negative impact. And I realized it was time to really weigh the decision of cutting them down.

In my experience, we all have similar obstacles that grow up quickly—be they new buildings, bushes, hedgerows, or trees—each our own version of subtle but inexorably expanding obstructions that somehow evade our notice as they increasingly shade our garden. This method helps us stop for a minute and empirically see what’s happened over the years—and decide if we want to change anything.