Garden planner
Draw your beds to scale, then fill them square by square, season by season.
How it works
The page opens on a sample bed, a 4 by 8 ft raised bed on a map where each dot is one foot. Drag it to where it sits in your yard, or remove it and add your own. New beds drop in with a 2 ft path between them, so the spacing on the map is spacing you can walk.
Switch to Plant and open a bed. Pick a crop, then tap the squares it goes in. Each square holds what the square-foot charts give for that crop: one caged tomato, four leaf lettuce, nine bush beans, sixteen carrots. A crop that needs more room, like zucchini, takes a block of two squares for one plant.
The year runs in four seasons, so a bed can hold tomatoes through the summer and garlic after them. When two crops that grow poorly together share an edge, the planner marks the edge and says which source advises keeping them apart.
Your plan saves in this browser and in the page's link as you go. Copy the link to open it on another device. Planting dates for your ZIP, the weather, and the full companion list come with Row & Bed.
The presets
- Raised bed, 4 by 8 ft
- Thirty-two squares, narrow enough to reach the middle from either side. Also its own page: the raised bed planner.
- In-ground, 4 by 10 ft
- A dug bed in the yard, forty squares.
- Container, sized in gallons
- A pot holds a short list instead of a grid, and each plant is checked against the smallest container our data gives for it.
- Perennial, 4 by 4 ft
- For crops that come back each year and stay put through every season.
Any bed can take other measurements: open it and type the width and length, as 4 ft 6 in or 54 in. For a single 4 by 4 grid, start from the square foot garden planner.
Questions
How many plants fit in one square foot?
It depends on how far apart the crop grows. The square-foot charts from Clemson Cooperative Extension and NC State Extension give one tomato with a cage, four leaf lettuce or basil, nine bush beans or beets, and sixteen carrots or radishes to a square. The planner uses those counts, switches to a regional chart where one differs once you add your ZIP, and shows the chart it took each count from.
Do I need an account to use the planner?
No. The planner runs in your browser and keeps your plan in its own link, so you can come back to it, pin it or send it to someone. When you want dates for where you live, Keep this garden adds your ZIP and carries the plan into Row & Bed.
Does the planner know my frost dates?
Not until you give it a ZIP. Without one, each crop is planned through the end of its season, and you can set how long it stays in the ground. Row & Bed reads your frost dates from NOAA 30-year climate normals and dates every planting from them.