It’s finally time to start planning out your seed order for this growing season, and that means planning a garden. You probably know the basics: choose a site that gets good sunlight and drains well, prioritize the produce you want and build up your soil.
There are a lot of decisions to make to put together a garden in the first place, and the more you learn, the more you can improve your design. It’s a lot of information to wrangle and can be overwhelming.
You can figure it out with pen and paper, but today you can also find online calculators, maps, quizzes and more to help you make decisions. They’re faster, easy to understand and often free.
Making a map
To get an easy map for drawing beds at the right scale, print out a satellite view of your garden area from Google Earth. You can also transfer this to graph paper.
Designing a layout
There are a number of paid apps and sites for planning out gardens and deciding what goes where, with tech-y names such as Planter, GrowVeg, VegPlotter and ShrubHub. Others are available with a subscription price from familiar publications including Mother Earth News and Farmer’s Almanac.
With some digging, you can find free sites to give you basic information too. Plant Buddies lets you select a crop and shows what other plants would grow with it and which ones wouldn’t. PermaPeople has a basic plotting page, sample designs from other gardeners and a space for a seed list and garden journal.
Open source (meaning free) software such as Kitchen Garden Aid can help you draw out the shape of your garden, inventory your seeds and suggest planting options, and Yard Plotter is a simple free drawing tool with plant images.
You can find other free garden software in various stages of development on sites like GitHub, and all of these sites can give you ideas for information to put into a simple online spreadsheet to keep yourself organized.
Planting seeds
You probably already know your seed catalog as a source of information about planting dates and basic seedling needs. Some suppliers have detailed online calculators available. Maine-based Johnny’s Selected Seeds has free tools for everything from figuring out seed yields to planning a planting schedule through the season to calculating how much it will cost to build a season-extending small greenhouse tunnel.
Adding cover crops
If your garden beds are established and you’re ready to start using cover crops between plantings, this online quiz from the Northeast Cover Crops Council makes recommendations based on your property and goals. The results tell you what each option can do for your soil, from loosening it up to giving it more nutrients to providing good forage for livestock. It’s hosted on the Maine Healthy Soils Program, which also has an online map of soil types.
Preparing for pests
If you’re planting into the ground, rather than in raised beds, you’ve hopefully had a soil test done and know what conditions you’re dealing with at home. An online habitat map offered by The Nature Conservancy can tell you more about the bigger picture, including what trees and wildlife habitats surround you.
For example, greater Bangor is surrounded by a good deal of Laurentian-Acadian Pine-Hemlock-Hardwood forest, a hefty name that describes dry soils in low elevations, which is home to voles, squirrels and mice.
Bonus options
Once the garden is planned and planted, you can also use online tools to help you manage it. Cornell University’s cooperative extension has several online decision-making maps for figuring out frost risk, calculating how much water you need to store during droughts, knowing when to spread manure, predicting pests and more. They’re focused on New York State, but you can change the zip code for Maine data.
