Garden Planner

Plan every planting from your own frost dates and always know what to do this week. Pick a crop, a year and a bed, and the Garden Planner works out when to start seeds indoors, harden off, plant out and harvest, then keeps track of your seeds, harvests and spending.

What's inside

16 tabs that work together:

• Dashboard: plantings, space, this week's jobs, a frost countdown, seeds to buy, and harvest value against spending.
• This Week: what to start indoors, harden off, plant out, sow and harvest this week, plus anything late.
• Calendar: every planting on a 53-week chart, from indoors and hardening off to growing and harvest.
• Seed Starting: your indoor sowing schedule, with cells, seeds, sprout dates and planting-out dates.
• Plantings: one row per crop each season, with dates, quantities, next step, status and advice.
• Beds: each bed's size, how full it gets through the season and the plant families in it.
• Garden Map: a square-foot grid where you type crop codes and the squares color by plant family.
• Crops: 101 crops with timing, spacing, yields and prices. Change any value or add your own.
• Seeds: your seed packets, seeds needed this season, what to buy and seed age.
• Harvest Log: what you pick, in pounds, ounces, each or bunches, valued automatically.
• Expenses: what the garden costs, by category.
• Journal: your garden diary of plantings, pests, weather and what worked, by bed and crop.
• Data Checks: automatic checks for missing or mistyped entries, plus planning warnings.
• Start Here, Settings and Help: a setup checklist; your frost dates, zone, household and safety margin; and answers to common questions.

Built to save you time

• Change your frost dates and every planting moves with them. No dates yet? Pick your USDA zone to start.
• Successions stop by themselves when the next sowing couldn't be harvested before frost.
• Fall crops count back from your first fall frost and get 14 extra days to harvest for shorter, cooler days.
• Row covers, cold frames and greenhouses shift a bed's dates earlier in spring and later in fall.
• Perennials carry over every year, with the wait before their first harvest (asparagus 2 years).
• Warnings for the same plant family in a bed as last year, plants commonly kept apart and beds planted over capacity.
• Seeds needed add up from your plantings into a list of packets to buy, and old seed is flagged.

Who it's for

Home vegetable gardeners with raised beds, rows or containers, from first-timers to growers keeping several seasons of notes. Zones and harvest prices are US-based, and the dates work from whatever frost dates you type.

What you get

• The Excel workbook (.xlsx), blank and ready for your own data
• The Google Sheets edition: open the PDF in your download and use its make-a-copy links to add it to your Google Drive
• An Example workbook filled in with sample data for a backyard garden in zone 6a, so you can see how everything works before you add your own
• A Quick Start guide (PDF)
• Free updates to the edition you buy
• Instant digital download after checkout

License

Standard covers your own use, personally or in your business, including your employees. Professional adds use with unlimited clients, for example filling in copies for clients and sharing the completed files with them; neither license allows reselling or sharing the template itself. Compare licenses

Requirements

Microsoft Excel 2010 or later on Windows, Excel 2011 or later on Mac, or Microsoft 365. For the Google Sheets edition, a free Google account. Best used on a computer. No macros.