My Favorite Online Garden Planning Tools

Creating a Garden Plan

When creating a garden plan, there are several variables to consider:

– the size of your garden

– the amount of sun your garden gets and the length of your growing season

– the number of people the garden will be feeding

– what you all like to eat

– what you would like to can, preserve or freeze

– the needs of the plants you want to grow

– the method of gardening you are using (raised beds, rows, Square Foot, biointensive, etc.)

Most gardeners start with a piece of graph paper and some pencils, and sketch out a plan of their yard. (Sometimes, it’s even to scale!)

Then, if you are a novice gardener, you will probably spend a lot of time looking at charts in gardening books or the instructions on the back of your seed packets to determine when to plant, how much space each plant needs to grow, and roughly when you will harvest.

Then, through nearly superhuman feats of logic, math and geometry, you puzzle out a plan for your garden. Or you give your brain a Charley horse with the effort, and end up just sticking some seeds and seedlings in the ground to map out later. (Maybe.)

While gardening should be at least as much a joy as it is an effort, if you want to have a garden that can provide a good portion of your food (if not all of it), you’ll need to have a plan.

Fortunately, some of those people overwhelmed (or perhaps bored) by hand-drawn, garden planning logic puzzles happened to be computer programmers. And they made the perfect apps for people new to, intimidated by, or tired of “old-school” garden planning.

Thanks to these three online vegetable garden planning tools, you can now take all the research and math out of planning your vegetable garden. In fact, whether you are a novice or an expert, thanks to technology, garden planning has never been faster or easier!

Kitchen Garden Planner by Gardener’s Supply Company

The Kitchen Garden Planner is a free, basic vegetable garden planner created by Gardener’s Supply Company, one of the better mail order gardening retailers. (They also have a very useful raised bed soil calculator, too!)

The Kitchen Garden Planner offers users two very convenient options: Selecting a pre-planned garden or creating your own garden plan.

For newbie gardeners, a pre-made garden plan can really make planning and planting your first garden very easy. Even experienced gardeners will find the pre-made plans unique and inspiring! The pre-designed bed templates are one of the best features of this planning app.

GrowVeg.com Garden Planner

The GrowVeg.com garden planning app is the Cadillac of online garden planning software. It is $25 for an annual subscription, but you can try it free for 30 days. GrowVeg is also available for your smartphone and your iPad.

GrowVeg.com determines the best times to plant, based on your zip code, and finds the average first and last frost dates for your area, based on records from over 5,000 weather stations across the United States and Canada.

If your experience in your microclimate points you toward different dates, you have the option of setting the frost dates yourself. Then GrowVeg will use these dates to tell you the best planting times for dozens of garden crops.

The GrowVeg.com Garden Planner software shows how much space your plants require and how to group them for maximum success, removing the need to look up planting distances and crop families. Most vegetables and herbs have already been coded with space requirements, so you can quickly see how many will fit in a given bed or row.

Read more and get links to these apps at the url below.