Planning Your Vegetable Garden Is Easy

Like many others, we want to reduce food miles, get our kids interesting in healthy eating, know what goes into our food and how it is grown. Oh yes, and save money!  The best way you can do all of these things is to turn flower beds, lawns or unused areas of your garden (yard) into an area in which to grow your own vegetables.

While this sounds reasonably straightforward, successfully growing your own vegetables involves more than just digging a few holes and sprinkling in some seeds or buying a bunch of plants from the local  garden center. It’s best to do some planning and to get to grips with things like the correct spacing of the plants, use of companion planting, what conditions the plants you want to grow need and so on.

One of the easiest to use tools I’ve found is the online Free Garden Planner Trial  at GrowVeg.com.  Not only does this software make it easy to develop a workable plan for your garden, but you will be able to print a customised planting calendar from your plan. The software tells you which vegetables need to be rotated to prevent the depletion of soil nutrients or a build-up of diseases and/or pests.  It even remembers where you grew your beans, peas, carrots, etc. last year so you’ll be able to quickly produce plans for this year’s garden without having to redraw the whole thing.

Additionally, you can opt to receive two email reminders each month telling when to sow your seeds and when to put the plants in the ground. A summary of what to buy, when to plant and when to harvest can also be printed off.

In case you are a beginner in all of this, GrowVeg.com has created information profiles for the most commonly grown vegetables, fruits and herbs – over 90 of them. These Growing Guides contain all the vital information you need to have a successful garden, along with troubleshooting tips and times for harvesting.

The software has a very user-friendly layout and the tools are similar to those used in Word, Publisher and other graphics programs.  It gives a complete list of plant pictures along the top that you click on and position on the measured garden grid (in meters and feet). The colored area around the plant gives you the correct spacing and filling in a whole row of the same plants is as easy as stretching the picture sideways.  Resizing the various planting areas works like resizing pictures or text boxes within other software programs, you simply use the “handles” to make the box bigger or smaller.

It also has really good help files within the user manual – easy to find what you need and easy to understand.  There are YouTube videos you can access to show you how to get started using the program, or draw your plan, add new plants, add planting reminders, frost dates, successive planting etc., etc.

I could go on and on but we’d be here all day.  To put it mildly, I was impressed!

Gardening Calendar – Planning Your Vegetable Garden the Easy Way