Planning a Vegetable Garden Garden Planner for Vegetables, Herbs, and Flowers

Fun, Easy Garden Planning

“You have made gardening EASY and FUN! Fail-safe crop rotations, plant quantities and supply (irrigation) list specific to my plan, planting times for my location for indoor and outdoor starts; this site has it ALL!! I have introduced this site to every nursery in my area - success makes for happy Gardeners!!! Everyone wants to know my secret…it’s YOU! Thank you for this amazing tool!”
–Lisa Fleck, Almanac Garden Planner

Yes, the Garden Planner can be a lot of fun. Think of a REAL Farmville. But it’s way more than that; the Garden Planner helps you plan a productive garden for a bigger harvest. See some of the benefits. 

Customized to Your Weather Location

The Garden Planner answers the most common questions for anyone planning their garden:

1. When exactly should you start your seeds, whether indoors or outdoors?
2. Which vegetables and flowers will grow well where I live?

No need to look up dates! No guesswork! The online Garden Planner shows you a personalized garden plan that’s already based on your exact location, intelligently tailoring your design to your specific climate, landscape, and experience.

Using data from over 5,000 weather stations, the Garden Planner also allows you to quickly find the best plants based on sunlight, soil, and other specified criteria. You can even select “easy” vegetables if you’re a beginner!

Evidence-Based Companion Planting

Last year, we included some companion flowers in our vegetable garden beds: marigolds and nasturtiums in another part of the garden. As well as adding a cheering splash of color, they help attract beneficial insects that help with crop growth, so we’re keen to include even more of them this coming season. Our plan is to include many more companion plants, safe in the knowledge that any small space lost to veggies will be more than made up for in the health of our crops.

We also want to make a real effort to group together plants that naturally benefit each other—and this is where the Garden Planner’s new Evidence-Based Companion Planting is simply brilliant. You just select a crop that you wish to grow and then tap on the Companion Planting icon; it now lists companions for that plant and the way the benefit between the two crops lies. And this is all based on proper scientific evidence, not hearsay! 

Crop Rotation: Avoiding Pests

This may be your first year growing a garden, but if you continue, it’s important to avoid planting the same crops in the same place if you want to avoid pests. For example, If we try to put tomatoes in the same bed as last year, the garden planner flashes red. That’s because this is where we grew them there previously, so now we know to move them elsewhere to avoid fostering tomato pests and diseases in that bed. In other beds, some crops are fine to repeat.

We love playing around with our plan—it’s half the fun of the whole planning process! 

Forget Paper and Pen

Draw out garden beds, add or remove plants, and easily move plants around to create the perfect layout—it’s much more versatile and exact than pencil and paper! No erasing and erasing. Beds can be resized and moved as required until you’ve perfected your plan. It’s like being able to move furniture with a finger. 

Speaking of furniture, if you have a laptop or an iPad, you can now plan right from the couch with your feet up and cocoa in hand. Then, when the weather warms up, bring your plan with you into the garden!

Credit: Bymuratdeniz/Getty

Save Money on Seeds and Plants

Never buy too many seeds or crowd your plants again!  The online Garden Planner calculates how many plants will fit into your space! This is one of our favorite features. No math or graphing by you is necessary—it’s all done automatically! You can easily stretch out the garden bed—extending the row or expanding it out into a block. And the number of plants will expand based on the correct spacing for that crop! As you expand, the software automatically calculates how many plants can be grown within that area, helping you to avoid overcrowding your plants and achieve the highest yields.

Once you finish your plan, you can print out a complete shopping list of plants and materials to easily get started.

Journal Your Garden!

We love snapping photos of our garden and taking notes! Tracking our progress is what truly helps us become a better gardener.

The Garden Journal is a free app that works on our mobile phone OR tablet device so you can bring it straight to the garden and take those photos outside, record when we planted or watered, make notes on the first appearance of pests, and see how much we’ve harvested.

That means that we can learn from our mistakes, see which vegetable variety worked best in our microclimate, and retain that knowledge. Understanding what to do next makes a huge difference to the success of a garden!

More Amazing Gardening Tools

The online Garden Planner is truly a gardener’s best friend, with year-round tools like…

• Personalized planting charts show how much of each plant you will require for your garden and when to sow, plant, and harvest them.
• Email reminders of what to sow and plant based on your personalized plan.
• Pest and disease information so that you can stay one step ahead of any problem and keep plants healthy and productive.
• A library of existing garden plans from gardeners in your area or gardens of a similar size, which you can browse to see what works well in your area. Choose plantings from our database of over 250 vegetables, herbs, fruit, and flowers.
• Instant access to expert knowledge in the form of hundreds of in-depth articles and informative videos on how to grow.

Free to Try for All!

We want everyone to experience more success in the garden! For this reason, we’ve tried to keep the annual cost as low as possible; much programming and work has gone into this sophisticated software to make it very easy, accessible, and friendly. Plus, we continue to provide expert advice and support year-round. As many garden planners will tell you, you’ll easily save that money each year using this garden planner. 

In addition, we offer a free trial (NO credit card required), so you are free to play around for seven days, which is ample time to plan your first garden.

Again, you can use the Garden Planner and all its features for FREE for a week! Here is a link to a free trial for those of you who have not used it yet.