, written by Benedict Vanheems 
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes and it’s finally here: our new and improved Garden Planner! Save yourself so much time, effort and guesswork, while maxing out the growing potential of the space you have. It’s powerful stuff!
Watch our video or read on to find out how the Garden Planner can help you.
Planting Dates Specific to Your Garden
Our Garden Planner is an incredibly advanced, and yet refreshingly easy to use tool that will have you planning your garden like a pro in next to no time. The new version improves on the Classic Garden Planner, combining all the best features with a clearer, more intuitive interface.
When creating an account, first set the location of your garden. The Garden Planner then uses this to find your nearest weather station and set your first and last frost dates, which it will then use to recommend planting dates and estimate harvest times local to you. Gardeners growing in a microclimate can manually adjust these dates for even better accuracy, while those in hot climates can split the growing season in two in order to avoid raising cool-season crops in the heat of summer.
Plan Your Garden Like a Pro
Click on the Create New Plan button to get started. Choose a name for your new plan, select the year, then enter the plan’s dimensions in either metric or imperial units. If you have a very large garden, you may want to create a separate plan for each area.
Start with the basic structural elements to your garden, positioning the paths, beds and containers that will form its bare bones. Objects are easy to resize, move about and orientate, so you can get everything just so. Include essentials such as compost bins, water barrels and sheds, then draw out the layout of any growing aids like irrigation lines and plant supports.
Pinpoint Precision Means Less Waste
Now for the plants, of which there are hundreds of vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers to choose from. One of the Garden Planner’s powerful advantages is that it calculates the optimum number plants that may be grown in a specific area, eliminating wastage. This automatically adjusts as you draw out a row or block, and the colored area behind the plants shows how much room they need to grow without being overcrowded.
The accompanying Plant List synchronizes in real time to show exactly how many plants you’ll need for each crop. You can also check their recommended spacings and refer to a month-by-month calendar of recommended planting times specific to your garden’s location – both indoors and out – and likely harvest dates.
Select the next tab along, for the Parts List, to view all of the equipment you’ll need to bring your plan to life. This comes in especially handy when starting a new garden or including elements with lots of components parts, such as irrigation.
Extend Your Growing Season
Adding crop protection such as a cold frame or greenhouse is a great way to extend the growing season. The Garden Planner knows this too! For instance, drop a cold frame over a plant on your plan and the Plant List will automatically extend the sowing, planting and harvesting dates for that plant as appropriate.
Square Foot Gardening
Followers of Square Foot Gardening are taken care of by the Garden Planner. Just toggle on to SFG Mode and the app works out exactly how many plants can be grown in each square foot. You can easily switch out of SFG mode whenever you need to in order to select and place standard-spaced plants such as fruit bushes. You can have both SFG and traditional blocks or rows of the same crop on the same plan.
Succession Planting to Maximize Harvests
Don’t settle for just one round of crops a year – hunger for more by planning succession, or follow-on crops. To do this, double-click plants on your plan and set the In-Ground Dates. Once that has been done you can view your plan in any given month and see precisely where and when gaps appear.
You can then pop in crops suited to planting in these months, or expand the filter options and select the Suitable for Fall Planting option for a range of late-season crops. You can also filter plants to show just those are easy to grow, frost tolerant or that display some tolerance to shady conditions.
Choose Companion Plants
The game-changing Companion Planting feature will help you find perfect matches for your plants. Simply select a crop on your plan, then hit the Show Companions button. The plant selector now shows the very best companion plants to grow alongside it. Get back to the full list by clicking the button again.
Effortless Crop Rotation
At the end of the season you’ll want to create a follow-on plan for next season. Click on the New Plan button in your plan’s toolbar or in the Garden Planner’s main menu. Toggle on the Create Follow-on Plan option then select the plan you’d like to work on. Choose which elements you’d like to copy over, then click Create Plan.
The Garden Planner will not just automatically create your follow-on plan, it also keeps a record of which crops grew where. Select a plant and you’ll see that areas occupied by the same crop family in the previous season show up red, so you can avoid growing there and thwart any lurking soil-borne pests and diseases. The Garden Planner shows crop rotation warnings for up to 5 years of past plans. How cool is that!
The Garden Planner is incredible, but don’t take my word for it. Try out our completely free 7 day trial and discover how the Garden Planner can transform your growing.
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