Garden Planner

Design your vegetable garden in under a minute: choose a template, enter your area and ZIP, and get real plant counts, space allocation, and cost — printable.

Garden templates

Each template is a fixed crop list with published spacing, so the planner is really choosing between eight different garden concepts rather than filling in a blank grid. Open any one to see its spacing table, seasonal fit, and counts at 16, 32, and 64 square feet.

Choosing a template

The table below reduces all eight templates to the same 32 square foot bed so they can be compared directly. Plant counts and costs are arithmetic on the published per-square-foot densities and unit costs; they are not yield estimates.

Three differences stand out. Tomato Lover has the shortest crop list at 3, which makes it the simplest to sow and the least likely to fail wholesale. Salad Garden packs the most individual plants into the same bed at 1312, because it is dominated by small-spaced crops. And the cheapest seed outlay is Culinary Herb Garden at roughly $46.40 per 32 sq ft — but note that the templates built around transplants rather than seed sit at the other end, because a tomato start costs far more per plant than a radish seed. Cost here is starter cost, not cost per pound of harvest.

What the inputs mean

The template is the primary input: it fixes which crops you are growing and, through each crop’s recommended spacing, how tightly they can be packed. The square footage scales those densities up or down. Because spacing is expressed as plants per square foot, the counts across the bed are roughly proportional to area, with rounding applied per crop — which is why doubling the bed does not always exactly double every count.

The ZIP code anchors the plan to your climate rather than the calendar. It sets your USDA hardiness zone and typical frost dates, which is what determines whether a warm-season template is realistic in your season length and when each crop goes in. Two people entering identical area with the same template and different ZIPs should expect different planting dates and a different verdict on which crops finish before the first fall freeze.

How to act on the answer

Treat the plant counts as a purchasing and layout decision, not a forecast. Buy seed or starts to the counts and lay the bed out at the densities shown, because a bed planted above the recommended density competes for light, water, and nutrients and typically returns fewer harvestable plants than one planted correctly.

The plan is most useful at the extremes. If the counts for a template exceed what you can realistically tend, that is a signal to cut a crop rather than to shrink the spacing — dropping the highest-maintenance crop from the template frees more of the bed than tightening everything. Conversely, if the whole bed still leaves you short of what you want to eat, scale the area rather than the density. When two templates look equally appealing, prefer the one matching your actual light: a full-sun template in a bed that only gets four or five hours will underperform a part-sun template no matter how well it is worked.

What this tool cannot know

It produces counts and a budget, not a diagram, and it does not model trellising, vertical growing, walkway width, or the shade a tall crop casts onto a low one — so the usable area is always somewhat less than the square footage you enter. It also assumes each crop gets its own block; if you plan to interplant a quick crop between slow ones, read the counts as an upper bound.

It cannot see your soil, your water, your pests, or your own time. The cost column is a starter estimate using the data layer’s unit costs and moves with regional pricing and with whether you sow seed or buy starts; it deliberately excludes soil amendments, irrigation, season-extension materials, and any tools you still need. And because it is anchored on typical thirty-year climate normals for your ZIP, roughly half of years will bring a later frost than the average — confirm dates against a ten-day forecast before acting on a sow or transplant recommendation.

Where it fits in the season

The planner is the layout step, so it works best alongside the pages that supply its assumptions. The ZIP lookup establishes the zone and frost dates the planner reasons from, and the monthly zone checklists convert the same baseline into an ordered set of jobs for the current month. Once the bed is laid out, the bed planner and the planting calendar take over the spacing and timing questions, and the watering and fertilizer calculators handle inputs after planting.

Everything on this page runs in your browser from data shipped with the site. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and the numbers you type are not stored on a server — which also means a printed sheet or a screenshot is the only copy you will have if you close the page. See all garden tools →