Garden planning software

I thought I might start a thread specifically to list the URLs of free or very cheap gardening planning software. (Moderators, please move this to another section if this isn't the right place.)

www.gardeners.com Free - Good square foot method - good list of veggies, but few herbs or flowers

http://rs881.rapidshare.com/files/366032742/Garden_Layout.xls Free - Excellent Excel file but very limited selection

http://myfolia.com/about/garden-planner?gclid=CMOnzaKByqACFRBM5QodYClRaw Free - Good for keeping a journal of plantings/ progress/ and harvest, but doesn't provide a grid garden that I could find.

http://cdmplanning.hypermart.net/ $5.00- Interesting slide chart for determining planting and harvesting dates. Not a grid planner.

http://www.plangarden.com/ 45 day free trial-$36.00 for 3 years thereafter. Very extensive list of veggies and herbs and flexible garden arrangements. No flowers I could find.

http://www.growveg.com/Default.aspx 30 day free trial - $25 year thereafter -- looks like an extensive program with many features but too expensive for me

I hope others might chime in and list URLs for other garden planning sites that are compatible with SFG. From what I've found, I'm sticking to gardeners.com and will just write in plants not listed.

I just discovered www.growveg.com and am really liking it thus far. They have a 30 day free trial that I'm using for now. You can draw in your garden and pick from all the most common crops they already have loaded in. You can then specify, for example, a certain kind of lettuce and put in the details of: spacing, growing season, ect. It also keeps track of where you planted things in the past and lets you know as you're re-planting so you can easily rotate and lets you save all your garden plans from each season along w/ any notes you add. Anyway, those are just some of the highlights I'm finding about it. Anyone here use or hear of this before? What are your thoughts?

Anything that does the organizing for you has my vote! I love those kinds of sites. Let us know how it works over time.

Stuff like this site are SO much fun for me. Ugh...I am so having to resist it right now. I got sucked into myfolia.com right away and now this looks SO MUCH BETTER....Aghhhhh it's agonizing.....

Recently, I posted a note in another thread about this website. I absolutely love it! It's by far the best I've yet seen. I consider the $25 annual fee (after your one-month free trial) a bargain.

BUMP Gardner's Supply Planner

Here's my favorite site. After you make your plan and click on
"Generate My Detailed Plan....." you get a complete plan with numbers of crops per square and when to start/plant them.
You can print it out for your reference.

http://www.gardeners.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Gardeners-Site/default/Page-KitchenGardenDesigner

LOL, Quiltbea, we posted the same link, what is it they say about great minds?

I just had the most fun planning a SFG! I'm a visual type person and this is heaven to me!

I don't know if my poor old brain can hold all of the info I'm putting in it!!

Betty

P.S. - Quiltbea and Camprn, I used your link.

I am a third generation rice farmer, but had very little time to be tending to a garden. My grandfather was very talented at growing vegetables in his garden. We raised everything you could imagine, including sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes and sweet potatoes. We had so many sweet potatoes that we could not even donate them any more.

Have you seen this new garden planning program? I just received my copy of Mother Earth News and in the "News from Mother" section they had an article about this program which lets you experiment with bed designs, uses your zip code to match your area with info from the nearest weather station to find first and last frost dates, allows you to plan succession plantings and crop rotations etc. You can even receive emails telling you which crops to plant when. It has a 30 day free trial and it's $25 a year.......that's not too bad for a program that has a lot of features. It does much more than I described, I'm just getting to know how to use it.

Just thought I'd share.

There's even a Square Foot Gardening setting which puts the number of plants in the corner of the icon with the picture of the veggie on your garden plan!!! How cool is that!!!

Sandy, Gardener's Supply offers the best planner I've found at gardeners.com, and it's free.

Go to the site, and type "kitchen garden planner" in the search box. On the next page scroll down to "design your own garden". It takes you step-by-step on how to use their garden planner. You can make them custom size up to four feet in width and any length you want. They are already divided into square-foot grids, and they have over 50 veggies you can click and drag to your boxes. (They keep adding additional veggies and flowers, and there is a place make requests.) It even shows how many plants should grow in each grid. You can save your plot and email it, print it, or store it on their site for future access. If you choose, you can print out a report which will tell you the planting and growing info on each of the crops you chose.

I made a page for each one of our boxes and beds and printed them out. I am putting them into a notebook for spring planting. The only problem I had was that I was unable to go back and do another bed, so I saved each one, printed it, and when I was finished I clicked back to the original page and clicked on "get started" again. That's the only way I was able to keep doing additional beds.

At first I was frustrated because their list of veggies didn't include everything I wanted to plant, then I learned that the edit button on the lower left can be used to change the name of anything planted in each square. So I just clicked on whatever plant on their list seemed to have the closest growth habit, then edited the name to the new veggie. I was also able to use that feature to add the variety names of all the different lettuces I'm planting in my salad bed. I felt like an artist with a canvas trying to picture the final look of the various light green, dark green, speckled, and red lettuces.

They have a vegetable encyclopedia with more info on each veggie, and they also have several pre-planned gardens which gave me more ideas for my own.

Bump

Stickyfiable? (Is that a word?)

I use plangarden, and they do have flowers, they are just hidden in the veggies, all one file to add things. I personally love it!!!

thanks for posting that info. That really helps and makes it so much more visual on paper. I used the gardeners.com and really liked it. You can make the beds like yours (unless you have an unusual design). Very helpful, thanks for posting.

When I downloaded:

[http://rs881.rapidshare.com/files/366032742/Garden_Layout.xls Free - Excellent Excel file but very limited selection]

I got a spyware error from McAfee. Is anyone having any problems with this XL file?

I really like the functionality of www.plangarden.com for the logs etc ... you can track garden tasks, harvest amounts etc ... I also love www.growveg.com/gardenplanner for the SFG planning - they include qty per square in their planner and give planting/transplant/harvest estimates based on your own individual frost dates by zip code as well as succession planting, but no logs etc ... If only some tech and programming SFGardener out there could come up with a combination fo the two I would love you forever

PlanGarden is working on all of that as I type, I got an email the other day about all of this. PlanGarden does currently have an estimated harvest date, I wrote those down on my paper copy. I agree I love the log, I keep track in my binder on paper, then transfer to log on a rainy or slow or no-plant day.

I got the email and accidentally deleted it. I know they added the SFG grid, but I didn't know that they were planning on adding the "per plot", sucession planting or the recommended planting dates. If so I am glad I chose to sub with then instead of one of the others

They do have a planning date, it's under the when to plant tab on the left, took me a bit to find it too.

I just wish that they had it intergrated into the planning software directly - less jumping around

For me it would be confusing, to much on the screen at once. I made my own spreadsheet (and printed out one of theirs) and keep it in my garden binder. The plant date will only change if the weather changes, and then it will only be a week or two at the most. My last frost date is March 13-16 (from a couple of resources), but with Easter coming late this year, that usually means one last freeze or at least a storm, and March came in pretty quiet, so it should go out like a lion, so I will be putting direct sow seeds in a week late. I do have my cukes, zukes, & summer squash started indoors, to give them a jump start, but corn and beans and such will have to wait.

What I did was put all the info in a data spreadsheet, sorted by date, and printed it out. I keep that out when planning, I've had it 3 years now so I pretty much know what to start when.

Hey windrider, did you get your email today about the updates we were just talking about? They do have the plant/start date in the veggie info thing, and the suggested amount per square for SFG. If you did not get it, PM me with your email and I'll forward you a copy.