One of my favorite seed companies, Territorial Seed Company in Cottage Grove, Oregon, has an online garden planner available. There are a series of tutorial videos to help one learn to create a garden plan, and one can be just about as detailed as one wishes. Other gardeners from around the world have uploaded their garden plans! One can peruse those plans and get some inspiration for a garden.
I am not going to spend a lot of time explaining how to use the garden planner program, as the excellent video tutorials do a great job of that. I do want to mention a few features that really make the program valuable. To get started, I entered my zip code into the garden planner, and it automatically calculated the last frost date in the spring and first frost date in the fall for my location. After outlining the garden beds, I could click on the vegetables I intend to plant and "drag" them (with my mouse) over to the garden bed where I then planted them. "Grabbing" the corners, with the mouse, I could enlarge one plant to an entire row. I could even enter vegetable variety names. The program automatically calculates how many of each plant will fill that row. Opening up the "supplies" list reveals a list of all the vegetables that I have "planted" in my plan. On the right side of the list is a graph that shows when vegetable seeds should be planted indoors, when to plant outdoors and when the harvest will start! Pretty cool!
Here is my first plan. After I created this one, I went back into the program and refined it by adding vegetable variety names. I also added more crops in different months.
The garden planner is free for 30 days. It can be found here www.territorialseed.com . Just don't forget to save your plan so that you can refer back to it. Also you can upload it to the web, so that others can see your garden plan and become inspired!
So inspiring.
ReplyDeleteThank you! When I went on the garden planner link I could see so many people had shared their garden plans and I felt inspired by them! ~ Stephanie
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