Planning a Garden
It sounds like is should be easy to plan a backyard vegetable garden. Yet, every year it’s the same thing. I pull out the plan from the past year, think about what worked and what didn’t, and start the whole process over again. Sometimes it starts on a napkin at the coffee shop. Other times I actually pull out a sheet of paper and start sketching it out.
I try to remember the actual dimension of the gardens themselves and then the sizes of the raised beds in the garden. I have to remember to set aside space for the pole beans because they seem to grow best on three poles set up in a triangle pattern at their base and then tied together at the top. Pole beans also seem to work well on a trellis. Then I have to figure out where to put the squash, tomatoes and everything else.
I usually get a bunch of ideas down and then start to think about things like what will grow best in that specific bed or how much sunlight does that vegetable really need? Are there complimentary vegetables that I can add to my garden design planning? Should any of the plants I’m thinking about be done as a part of a container garden plan? Should I be rotating crops from one bed to another? When should I plant what?
So much for easy! This year I decided to go online to see if I could find some better tools to help with the planning. I’d used Microsoft Visio in the past but never really could find a good garden template with good icons for the vegetables and enough information about each one. Visio is also pretty expensive, particularly if this is all you plan to do with it.
Better Homes and Gardens seemed promising. They offer a free garden planning tool. I entered my first name and an email address in the form and unchecked all of the “FREE” newsletter offers (I don’t want my mailbox filled with more stuff that slows down my PC), and then entered a password. Next came another screen that asked for a whole lot more specific information than I wanted to give out and a bunch of additional offers. I quickly realized that FREE really isn’t FREE if it means signing up for a bunch of other stuff.
In the end, I did finally manage to get into the BHG product itself but was disappointed. The user interface looks slick and pretty and it should have been easy to use, but it didn’t give me the information about the vegetables and plants that I was looking for, nor did it give any spacing information or rotational data. There weren’t even suggestions about what to plant where and why. In the end, it just makes pretty garden pictures.
I was looking for more…
Fortunately, I found a cool software package that you can try for 30 days at NO Cost. If you like it the cost is $25 to sign up. If you don’t it won’t have cost you anything to try.
Click Go To The Garden Planner to get started. You’ll be up and running in 4 EASY steps.
- On the garden planner website, click on the either the Free Trial link or click on the Start Garden Planner button in the upper right corner of the screen.
- Click on the “Create An Account” button, put in your email address and your password, then click on the OK button
- Check your email inbox for the account activation, then click on the OK button
- Check out the Learn to Use videos and have fun!
In no time at all I put together my garden and am now ready to go and plant my plan.
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