Vegetable Garden Planner — Design Your Garden Layout Online for Free

Our free vegetable garden planner lets you design your garden layout online before a single seed goes in the ground.

First choose the size and shape of your garden.

Drag and drop vegetables into a planning grid, arrange your beds the way you want them, and print your finished design to take outside with you when you plant.

No sign-up required, no software to download, and no subscription fees — just a simple, practical vegetable garden planner that works right in your browser.

Click the graphic below to open the interactive vegetable garden planner and start designing your garden layout.

Click on the image to begin planning your vegetable garden layout!

A good vegetable garden planner saves you from the most common beginner mistakes:

• Planting tall crops where they will shade shorter ones
• Crowding plants too close together
• Forgetting to leave room for paths between beds

Spending twenty minutes with a vegetable garden planner before you plant can save you hours of replanting and rearranging later in the season.

How to Use the Vegetable Garden Planner

Use this sample, or create your own version of this Square Foot Garden plan.

Using our vegetable garden planner is simple:

1. Choose your garden size
2. Select your vegetables and drag them in place
3. Print your plan

The grid represents your garden space, with each square equal to one square foot — the same measurement used in square foot gardening, one of the most popular and efficient methods for small home vegetable gardens.

To use the vegetable garden planner, select the vegetables you want to grow, drag them into position on the grid, and arrange them in whatever configuration fits your space.

A few tips for getting the most out of the vegetable garden planner.

Start by placing your tallest crops first — corn, tomatoes on stakes, pole beans on trellises — along the north side of the garden if you are in the Northern Hemisphere.

This ensures that tall plants do not cast shade over shorter crops as the season progresses.

Then fill in medium-height crops like peppers, eggplant, and bush beans in the middle section, and reserve the south-facing edge for low-growing crops like lettuce, radishes, and herbs.

Once you have a layout you are happy with, use the print function to take your vegetable garden planner design outside with you.

Many gardeners laminate their printed plan and keep it in the garden all season as a reference for what is planted where.

Planning Your Garden Beds

Sample 10 x 20 vegetable garden plan.

The most important decision in any vegetable garden planner is how to divide your space into beds. Wide beds — those more than four feet across — are hard to tend without stepping on the soil, which compacts it and damages root systems.

A vegetable garden planner that uses the square foot method keeps beds at a manageable width while maximizing how many plants you can fit in the space.

When designing your beds in the vegetable garden planner, remember to include paths. A path of at least eighteen inches between beds lets you move comfortably with a garden cart or kneeling pad.

Wider paths of two to three feet are worth the space if you plan to use a garden cart or wheelchair for accessibility. These paths do not show up as productive growing space, but they are just as important to a working garden as the beds themselves.

Also use your vegetable garden planner to think through water access.

Every bed in your garden should be within easy reach of a hose or irrigation line.

A garden bed that is inconvenient to water tends to be under-watered — and under-watered plants under-perform. Your vegetable garden planner is the right time to think through logistics, not after the beds are built.

Companion Planting in
Your Vegetable Garden Planner

Companion Planting Guide to download for reference.

One of the most valuable uses of a vegetable garden planner is working out your companion planting arrangements before you commit to a layout.

Companion planting — grouping certain vegetables together because they benefit each other — is much easier to plan on paper (or on screen) than to figure out on the fly at planting time.

Classic companion planting combinations to build into your vegetable garden planner include tomatoes with basil, which is said to repel aphids and improve tomato flavor.

Also, carrots with onions, which each deter the other's main pest; and the Three Sisters combination of corn, beans, and squash, which has been used by Native American gardeners for centuries.

Our companion planting chart gives you a complete reference guide to good and bad companions for all the major vegetable crops — a useful tool to have open alongside your vegetable garden planner when designing your layout.

The Three Sisters; companion planting corn, squash, and beans.

• Companion Planting Chart — free printable quick-reference chart showing good and bad companions for 20 vegetables
• Companion Planting of Vegetables — complete guide to companion planting with the science and tradition behind it

Crop Rotation — Planning Ahead
in Your Vegetable Garden Planner

Cover to our free Vegetable Gardening Diary--coming soon to our website!

A vegetable garden planner is also the best tool for planning crop rotation.

Crop rotation means moving vegetable families to different beds each season to prevent the buildup of soil-borne diseases and pests that target specific plant families.

Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant (all in the nightshade family) should not grow in the same bed two years in a row. The same applies to brassicas, cucurbits, and alliums.

The simplest crop rotation system divides the garden into four sections in your vegetable garden planner: one for nightshades, one for brassicas, one for legumes, and one for roots and everything else.

Each section rotates to the next position in the following season. Using your vegetable garden planner to record this rotation means you always know what grew where, making it easy to plan the following year's layout correctly.

If you use our free garden diary worksheet, you can record each season's layout alongside your notes on what worked and what did not.

Over several years, this becomes one of the most valuable gardening references you own.

• Vegetable Garden Worksheets — free printable garden diary and planning worksheets to record your layout each season
• Succession Planting Vegetables — how to plan successive plantings so you have harvests throughout the season

More Free Vegetable Garden Planning Tools

USDA zone chart to use when planning a vegetable garden.

Our vegetable garden planner is one of several free planning tools available on this site.

Once you have your garden layout designed, use our zone finder to confirm your USDA hardiness zone and frost dates, then check our vegetable planting calendar for zone-specific planting windows for all your chosen crops.

Our free vegetable garden plans give you ready-made layout designs in several sizes if you prefer to work from a pre-designed starting point rather than building your vegetable garden planner layout from scratch.

All of our planning tools are free, printable, and designed to work together as a complete planning system for home vegetable gardeners at every experience level.

This page is part of our Free Vegetable Garden Printables collection, where you will find all our free downloads in one place — worksheets, plans, coloring books, zone charts, and more.

Free Vegetable Garden Printables — all our free downloads for home vegetable gardeners in one place