DIY Garden Planner: What to Track

The DIY garden planner is three pages

A DIY garden planner is smaller than it looks. Three pages hold everything you need to plan and run one vegetable season.

The first page is the map. Draw your plot or beds once, with sizes, and copy it each year so you can show where each crop family sat. The second page is the crop sheet. The third is a log, where each planned date gets an actual date beside it.

A planner you build yourself is only as good as the last thing you wrote in it.

The map page: draw it once

Draw each bed with its length and width, and label the bed with a number. Measure with a tape. A bed that is 4 by 8 feet on paper should be 4 by 8 feet in the yard.

Make a photocopy or a second printout for every season. Write the crop family in each bed on the copy. Iowa State's journaling page, quoted below, lists garden maps and crop rotation plans among the things worth keeping, and a stack of yearly maps is how you see which bed held tomatoes last year.

Six columns for the crop sheet

Washington State University Extension publishes a 4-H Garden Record as a free PDF. Its page asks you to draw a map of your garden plot showing shape, size and the general arrangement of crops. Its planting plan has six columns, and those six are a good frame for your own sheet.

Ten crops and six columns make 60 cells. That is the whole sheet for a typical first plan, and you fill it with an extension table open beside you.

The log: planned against actual

The sheet earns its keep in the actual column. An Iowa State University Extension page reviewed in May 2025 says anything related to your garden can go in a journal. Its list includes planting dates, harvest dates, a plant inventory, favorite cultivars, plants that thrive or fail, garden maps and crop rotation plans.

You do not need all of that. Keep four things: the actual planting date, the first harvest date, what thrived and what failed. Those four let you compare this year with next year.

Notebook or spreadsheet: the same six columns

A notebook works with a ruler. Rule six columns across a page, label them with the WSU headings and leave the actual column empty. A spreadsheet works the same way. Put the six headings in row one, one crop per row, and print the sheet so you can write at the bed. Keep the map as a separate page, since a grid of cells does not show shape.

How much to plant, and the mistakes to catch

Household size decides quantity, but the extension pages open for this article give no per-person plant counts. A Clemson Cooperative Extension planning factsheet says to plan the garden on paper first, drawing a map of the arrangement and spacing of crops. It also says not to plant more garden than you need. Iowa State's planning page calls about 100 square feet a manageable starting size, and says many new gardeners do better with 4 by 8 feet. Take the plants per 10 feet of row from your state's table, as in the Kansas guide below, and copy it into the sheet.

Clemson's pitfalls fit a homemade sheet. They are planting too densely, shading short crops with tall ones and skipping crop rotation. Catch them mid-season by reading the actual column against the map each month. Clemson also says successive plantings of beans extend the harvest, so add a second row for a crop you will sow again.

Where to get the numbers

The sheet has blank cells, and the numbers come from somewhere. Your state's extension office is the best place to look.

A Kansas State University guide, MF315, revised in February 2023, shows what one such table holds. For each crop it lists days to first harvest, plants per 10 feet of row and the spacing within and between rows. Bush beans, for example, take 50 to 60 days to first harvest. The guide notes that its contents may be freely reproduced for educational purposes. Kansas figures suit Kansas, so look for the table from your own state.

Ready-made tools exist too. A University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension article says Kentucky gardeners can download a free app called SOW, which has three parts: a Library, a My Garden area and a Journal. The app is largely based on a Kentucky home vegetable guide, so gardeners elsewhere should check their own extension office first.

The point where buying is faster

Building your own works well for ten crops. The cost grows when you want a full crop chart.

The Winter Plan's master chart covers 41 crops. It lists a frost class, indoor, transplant and sow weeks, the last fall sowing week, days to harvest and resowing, then in-row, row and bed spacing, plants per square foot and depth. That is 12 values for each crop, and 41 times 12 is 492 values you would look up and copy yourself.

The table sets the two jobs side by side.

Somewhere between 60 and 492, a finished chart gets faster than a blank one.

If you reach that point, The Garden Year bundle has the chart, the bed plans drawn at true scale and the planning pages already built.

When building your own is the better choice

Stay with your own sheets if you grow a handful of crops and like writing things down. A notebook and a ruler cost almost nothing, and your county extension office may already publish dates that fit your garden. The WSU record above is free, so buy a kit only if the lookups are the part you want to skip.

A kit is the same pages, already built. Its dates count from your own last-frost date, with a 108-station table of freeze dates in the file, so any US zone works. Plan and record pages share one file: the grow list and bed plans in winter, then the planting log, rain and watering sheet and harvest tally as the season runs. Print one page first and see whether paper suits you.