Garden Planner Printable: Eight Pages to Check

What a garden planner printable has to cover

A garden planner printable has two halves. One half decides the season before it starts. The other half records what happened.

The planning half answers three questions. When does each crop go in, where does it go, and how much room does it need? The record half answers a fourth. What actually worked?

The table lists the eight pages and the one check that tells you a page is good.

A planner you never write in is a poster.

The frost page dates everything else

Every date in a vegetable planner counts from a frost date. Spring crops are timed back from the last frost, and fall crops are timed back from the first one.

A Kansas State University planting guide says its planting windows are approximate and may need to move earlier or later depending on the weather, the variety and your location. A printable that gives one fixed calendar for the whole country cannot know your frost date. A good one asks for your date and counts from it.

So page 1 should have a box for the last spring frost, a box for the first fall frost, and a place to write what you expect and what you saw. The Season Record kit has a field for observed dates, so you can compare next year.

The yard map and bed plans: drawn to scale

A map you cannot measure is a doodle. The University of Delaware says a rough sketch will do, but it must be fairly accurate to be useful. It recommends making the plan to scale if possible.

Here is how scale works on a Letter sheet. Leave half an inch of margin on every side and you have 7.5 by 10 inches of drawing area. At 1 inch to 1 foot, that is a 7.5 by 10 foot area. A 4 by 8 foot bed is a 4 by 8 inch rectangle, and it fits with room to spare. At 1/4 inch to 1 foot, the same sheet holds 30 by 40 feet (7.5 ÷ 0.25 and 10 ÷ 0.25), which is enough for a whole backyard plot.

Delaware also lists what a plan should show. Draw the shape, length and width of the garden, the space between rows, the vegetables in each row and the late crops that follow the early ones. Keep tall crops such as corn away from small ones such as beets and carrots. Put the garden away from trees and buildings if you want the most sunlight.

The bed plans in The Garden Year bundle are drawn at 1 inch to 1 foot for beds of 4 by 8, 4 by 4, 3 by 6 and 2 by 8 feet, and the plot graph is 28 by 32 feet at 1/4 inch to the foot. Those two scales are the ones in the arithmetic above.

The crop list needs spacing and days

Page 4 turns "what do I want to grow" into "how much room does it take". Kansas State's guide lists, for each vegetable, the days to first harvest, the spacing within a row and the spacing between rows. Beets, for example, are listed at 2 to 3 inches within the row and 18 inches between rows, with 50 to 65 days to first harvest.

Spacing both ways is what lets you count plants per bed. Days to harvest tell you whether a crop finishes before the first frost.

Your own short list of crops fits on one page. Add a column for "grow again?" and fill it in at season end.

How many plants a household needs

The crop list also sets quantities. The Kansas State guide gives an approximate planting per person: 3 to 5 tomato plants, 3 to 5 pepper plants, 15 to 16 feet of snap bush beans and 2 to 3 hills of summer squash. For a household of three, that is 9 to 15 tomato plants (3 × 3 and 5 × 3). Write the per-person figure in the crop list, multiply by the number of eaters, then check the total against the beds you drew.

The calendar and the seed list

The calendar page takes your frost date and gives each crop a sow week, a transplant week and a harvest week. Count in weeks from the frost date, not in months. A month name only fits the area where the chart was made. A University of New Hampshire Extension post says tomato seed packets direct you to start seeds indoors six to eight weeks before the last frost, so your sow date is your frost date minus those weeks.

The seed list sits beside it. Write what you already own, the year you bought it and what you need to order. The record of seed age saves you from counting on a packet that no longer sprouts.

The rotation grid covers three years

Rotation needs memory, and memory fades. A Clemson Cooperative Extension fact sheet says a crop should only be grown in the same spot a maximum of once every three years. It also says to keep notes on which crops were planted, where and when.

Page 7 has a simple test. A grid with beds down the side and years across the top must reach at least three years. With three beds you can move one crop family through each bed in turn. The Winter Plan's rotation grid runs 4 years across 10 beds, which is 40 boxes to fill.

Record pages: what to write down

The last page feeds next year's plan. An Iowa State University Extension page lists what a garden journal can hold, including planting dates, planting locations, seed starting dates, harvest dates, harvest amounts, seed inventory, a crop rotation plan and garden maps. Iowa State says that over time you will have a clear record of which plants thrived and which struggled.

You do not need all of it. A planting line for each sowing and a harvest line for each picking cover most of it. Weigh a few crops to see how your numbers compare with the guide.

Use the page in order. Write the planned date in winter. On sowing day, write the real date on the planting line. At each picking, add the date and amount to the harvest line. In the fall, compare planned and real dates for each crop, and carry the differences into next year's calendar.

Fixing the plan in July

Mid-season problems are normal, and the paper plan is where you fix them. If a crop outgrows its box, thin it. The University of Maryland says that failing to thin seedlings will stunt plant growth and reduce the harvest, so pull or snip the extras to your listed spacing.

If a bed empties early, fill it. A second University of Maryland page describes succession planting as planting seeds or transplants in spots vacated by spent plants. Cross out the finished crop on the bed plan and write the new one beside it, with the date. If you later find a crop in the wrong place, redraw only that bed. Your notes tell you what to change next year.

Check the print before you trust it

Printing is where a printable fails. A page sent to "fit to page" shrinks, and a scaled drawing that shrinks stops being to scale.

Print at actual size, which is 100 percent. Then use the ruler test in the Pro Tip above. A printable that is built to print at true scale on a home printer will pass it.

The kits in The Garden Year ship as US Letter and A4 PDFs, and the bed and tray grids are meant to print at 100 percent.

Free printables that already do the job

Free pages are enough in some cases. If your state extension office publishes a planting calendar for your county, a free copy plus a sheet of graph paper covers pages 1, 3 and 5. If you only grow tomatoes in two pots, you do not need an eight-page planner at all.

Paid pages pay off when you want all eight in one file, so the frost page, the bed plans and the rotation grid share the same dates. You fill the frost page and bed plans in winter, then use the Season Record's planting log, rain and watering pages and harvest tally in the season, and its carry-forward page the next winter. Any US zone works, because every date counts from your own last frost date.