I love garden planning. I think most gardeners probably do. There’s nothing more exciting then thumbing through the beautiful pictures in seed catalogs and deciding which ones will grace your own garden. At times I think I even fool myself, whilst purveying the catalogs, into thinking that my veggies will look as good as the pictures. Deep down I know they won’t. They never do, but that doesn’t stop the feelings of anticipation that this year everything will go right.

 Not only is planning fun, it’ also very crucial to a successful vegetable garden. Crop rotation, for instance, is hard to do if you’re relying on your memory for what to plant next. Can you really remember every plant you’ve planted in every spot of the garden for the past four years? Of course not. Don’t pretend you do because you don’t. Ha.

Your garden will never reach it’s full potential if you don’t plan for it. Read that again, it’s important.

 One of the best things you can use to help plan your garden is a Garden Map. It allows you to experiment and move your planned plantings around without actually having to dig anything up. This will allow you to get everything you need to plant and where you need to plant it in your head before you go out there and screw everything up. It eliminates the “I wish I would have put the over here.” or “I wish I had planted less cucumbers and more tomatoes.” It will also help you keep track of what varieties are placed where, in case you don’t have plant tags or your plant tags mysteriously disappear like they so often do (ever notice that?).

   I like to have one map for each season (since I garden all four seasons most years).  I used to keep the current and “next up” map taped to the wall behind my desk where I can see it and am able to refer to it often. Now I just keep an icon on my desktop to the file. The map has to-scale drawings of my whole garden and lists inside each bed what vegetable plant and variety I am growing there or want to grow there, the date I planted it or the date I am going to plant it, and whatever notes I can fit.

  I make all my maps at one time (using December of the previous year), so I’ll know exactly what I going to plant and when I’m going to plant it for the next 4 seasons. Takes a load off your mind, let me tell you.

 Make The Map

 Making a map is simple and you probably don’t need me to tell you how, being the smart cookie that you are, but you basically need two things-

1.    Measurements of you garden beds/rows/plots

2.    A medium for drawing a map (computer program, graph paper, whatever) 

 Measurments for my garden is easy. All my beds are 4×25ft long with two foot rows in between. The exceptions are my herb garden, which is a 14ft circle, and a little grouping of 8 3×15ft beds for my perennial vegetables.

   If your garden is more artistic than mine, then measuring it may be more difficult. Anyway, it’s not rocket science and things on your map don’t have to be perfectly proportioned, it’s just nice if they are. If you garden in rows, measuring the layout is very easy.

  Once you have all the measurements, lengths, width, and space between beds/rows and garden areas, write them down on a piece of paper and head to your desk or computer to work it all out!

   I personally like keeping all my garden notes, maps, plans, seed starting log on my computer- since I’m on it so much and I find it much easier to organize little icons then real sheets of paper that bend and tear and give me paper cuts.

Draw By Hand

    If you must draw it by hand, however, get yourself a pad of graph paper and a pen and work it all out. Make each block on the grid a certain length. The bigger the better to still fit on the sheet. You’re going to be writing and scratching out and re-writing all over this map. Make copies.

 Using PlanGarden

 The penultimate garden mapping tool is Plangarden. It’s a paid subscription web-based garden planning software. The subscription is $20 a year ($12/year for 3 years). I have the three year subscription, and absoletly love this program. I don’t always have internet access, so that can be a bummer.   The features are pretty cool, however, with all kinds of options for bed sizes and shapes, vegetable selectors, harvest log, and field notes. It also has fun social networking aspects through the website, where you can view and comment on other’s gardens. The most exciting thing about this software is that the developers seem to be forever adding new features in updates, which won’t cost you any extra if you subscribe. Already a good product, it will likely get even better as time goes on. On the other than, it may be a bit too complex for everyone and the features overkill. Also, it really doesn’t allow you to make maps for future seasons, and there’s a few obvious features it should have but doesn’t, like the ability to search for notes relating to a specific vegetable.

   As far as I’m aware, this is really the only viable vegetable garden planning software around. Everything else I’ve tried sucks. If you know of other good garden planning software, let me know and I’ll give it a whirl.

Using Inkscape

 Another good option is a drawing program. I find the free, open source program Inkscape to work well for this. I save one file of my basic garden layout for a template and then make new files from it for each of my four season  maps. I use the text feature to write in the vegetable I’m placing in different areas and for entering the date and use the color codes for various purposes known only to me. It’s simplicity itself and it gets the job done. Similar drawing programs work well also, just be sure your program has a grid feature. I think they pretty much all do.

 So if you don’t already have a garden plan map, I hope this post encourages you to do so. You will find it makes youe life much simpler and it really doesn’t take that much effort.