Garden Planting Planner

A table and a plot plan

Twelve month rows, three columns each: sow or start indoors, plant out, harvest. Under the table, a square grid for drawing the beds, six to sixteen cells a side.

A season or plot label prints in the corner, so a sheet can say 2027 or Allotment or Back garden rather than nothing.

Three columns because there are three dates

The commonest beginner's error: treating the sowing date on the packet as the only date that matters.

A tomato sown indoors in March is planted out in late May and picked from July. Those are three separate decisions in three separate months, and the packet usually gives you one of them clearly and the others in small print. Splitting the columns forces all three onto the page, which is what turns a list of intentions into a schedule.

Read down, not across

Filled in properly, the table shows the problem months before they arrive.

Everybody plans April. Nobody remembers the windowsill holds nine trays rather than twenty-five, and reading down the sow column tells you that in January while it can still be fixed. The harvest column does the same job at the other end, which is where you find that everything ripens in one fortnight in August and you are away for it.

Succession sowing lives in this table

The single change that most improves a small vegetable plot. It only works written down.

Sow a whole row of lettuce at once and you get forty lettuces in one week and none for the rest of the season. A short row every fortnight gives you lettuce all summer instead. That is a plan made on a page in January rather than a decision made standing in a garden centre in April, and the month table is exactly the right shape to hold it.

The bed grid

Draw the plot to scale. Decide what a cell is worth and write it in the margin — one cell to a foot works for most raised beds, one to a metre for a larger plot.

Then use it for rotation. Last year's sheet beside this year's is what stops brassicas going back where brassicas were — which matters for club root and a good deal else. Rotation is a three or four year idea. It is unworkable from memory.

Keep the old ones

A completed year is a record of what actually cropped and what failed. That is worth more than any general planting guide, because it is about your soil, your aspect, your weather.

Related: the houseplant care tracker for indoors.