Figuring out what you’re going to grow, where and how much space to put in between vegetables can be a daunting task even for experienced gardeners. Every year I draw out my garden plan on a sheet of graph paper. This year I’m trying something new to help me plan my vegetable garden – online garden planners!
Creating A Garden Plan
As I discussed in Gardening 101- The Basic of Planning Your Vegetable Garden, the first thing you need to do is find a good site for your garden. Once you have a chosen where you’re going to put your vegetable garden, you can then move on to layout and picking what you’re going to grow. These online garden planners help you figure out how to layout your vegetable garden and offer helpful tips on when to plant, what to plant and how to space what you plant.
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This website provides you with a custom garden plan.. You have to sign up with an email and then you get to name your garden. You also input your zip code and how many people your garden is supposed to feed. Then you pick raised beds, in the ground or containers. Select your plants and it creates a garden plan. It will arrange the plants for you if you want or you can do it yourself with a drag and drop feature. It also gives weekly to-dos by email or your online journal.
There are many features that I like about this site like the weekly reminders, that you can choose containers (!) and that it gives you an estimate of your different growing seasons based on historical data. It has an extensive list of vegetables. For example I’m growing peanuts this year and it had 8 varieties to choose from. But I’m also growing cotton and that was not on the list.
This interactive vegetable garden planner lets you draw out your vegetable garden with drop and drag feature. It has over 130 common vegetables, herbs and fruit for you to add to your planner. It is free for 30 days and doesn’t require a credit card to begin with. You do have to sign up with an email address.
What I liked about this one is that it has short informative videos on Square Foot Gardening & Succession Planting. Once you pick your plants, it gives you their spacing and when to plant them based on your location.
This website has already made up vegetable garden plans like the All American (example down below) or the High Yield which all come with a shopping list, planting guides and layout.
Or you can use Design Your Row or Bed option by dropping and dragging your vegetables for a custom plan.
This is the easiest and most user friendly of the three online garden planners but only has just the most common types of vegetables available for adding to your planner.
There are a few more online garden planners available but these are the first three that I’ve tried.
I hope you’ll try one of these online vegetable garden planning tools to help you create a beautiful and productive garden this year.
So what do you think? Are you old school paper and pencil or are you going to embrace garden technology this year when planning your vegetable garden?
Please check out my Gardening 101 Series for more gardening tips
Thanks so much for these references Manuela. I do love sketching garden plans with my pencils & colorful markers, but am so happy to have online help as this is still all so new to me.
Our veggie garden is so small these days, well small to us. It is 9 raised beds that are 4×4. I don’t usually draw anything up anymore.Just try to remember what I did last year, so I don’t repeat in the same bed. Those programs look like a lot of fun though. I could have used something like that when I was planting a 50 square foot garden!
They have plans for container gardens so I don’t think most people would consider 9 raised beds a small garden!
I’m going to have a good, long look at this, Manuela. Thanks!
Was there one of the three that you liked better? Right now I have four raised beds, but there is room for a couple more, and I want to use the space in the most efficient way I can.
Have you grown peanuts before? That’s not something we usually grow in Nebraska, but I remember when they gave us a peanut plant in school and my dad gave me a little spot by the back door to plant it. It was exciting for the entire family when we got peanuts.
So far I like the first one best, SmartGardener. It has the greatest variety of vegetables available to add to your planner.
No this will be my first time growing peanuts, popcorn and cotton!
No garden here, but those are neat tools to help a person plan.
Enjoy your weekend.
I’m going to heck out what you’ve shown us today! Thanks. Hugs, cindy
Lol, Earl has been trying to get me to “plan” a garden for years. I plan to dig up the flower beds this year and redo them, he insists I plan it all out. I’ll try, but I’m a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl and no two ways about it. I usually buy plants and if I can’t fit them all in the bed, I tuck them here and there in bare pots in the flower bed.:>)
Oh wow! Thanks for the resources! We are planning our garden now and this will be such a help. Now, if I just don’t kill everything we try to grow!
Wow Manuela! That’s quite a comprehensive garden plan! I’d love to grow vegetables but I wouldn’t have anything left because the deer and rabbits would eat it all. I’m sticking to flowers and herbs. The resources you provided will be very useful to your readers. Thanks for popping by today. On another note, I love your farmhouse style kitchen and the sign you got for your anniversary is fantastic! I’m working on creating something for my kitchen to commemorate my grandparents old non working dairy farm (they rented to a local farmer who had cows) I’m sure your garden will be inspiring this year.
I try to plan my garden out in a notebook each year to make sure I’m rotating my crops. But I usually have that done by Christmas. This year, not so much 😉 I’ve really got to get busy. I would love to have you share this on The HomeAcre Hop!
I like to think that I would keep up with an online gardening planner but alas, my computer screen doesn’t reflect well outside in the garden, ha ha! I have a friend that LOVES using it though and I believe that whatever helps you get the job done is the right way to go!
I’d love it if you shared this post and up to two others at Farm Girl Blog Fest #21, which is live right now. You would be a great addition to the wonderful posts that are shared!
Farm Girl Friday Blog Fest #21
Hope to see you there!
~Kristi@Let This Mind Be in You
Well you could print it out 🙂
Great post Manuela! I may unearth my veggie bed this year. Haven’t done one in eons. I like the first option and will look into it if I get the bed opened up…
I think it may be time for me to join the modern world. I always torment myself trying to plan the garden, and some expert tools could really be a blessing. Thanks for sharing!
Great info! I have talked my husband into using raised beds this year:) Thanks! Have a blessed weekend, HUGS!
I love your garden plan. 🙂 seeing people planning out their garden fills me with happiness as i’ve done it too many times in my head or on paper, then lost everything. I also found some brilliant tips over at the blooming oasis which helped plan out vegetable gardens.