10 Best Garden Planners, Programs, and Apps

Online garden planners are excellent tools for organizing and maximizing your garden's potential. They help you design the layout and select the contents to best suit your garden's needs.

With various planners, you can specify the size, shape, and terrain to create the best garden beds for your space. You can also add boundaries like fences or walls, plan a sprinkler system, and strategically place plants, trees, or bushes.

Explore additional resources for your gardening projects, including tips for getting free seeds, and free plans to help you construct a greenhouse, shed, or potting bench.

Benefits of Garden Planners

Many of these programs let you zoom and move around to get all the features placed exactly where you want them. You can also start out with a garden design template to plan a garden or create your own plan from scratch.

After you've planned your garden, many of the planners let you print out or save your garden layout, including a list of supplies you'll need to buy to implement your design.

01 of 10

Gro Veg Garden Planner

How to Use It: Download on desktop or mobile

Gro Veg Garden Planner features many plants you won't find on other websites. You can add plants, objects, and structures to your garden plan to make sure that they'll receive enough sunlight and water. This planner lends itself to plotting out rows, raised garden beds, square foot gardens, container gardens, and more.

This online garden planner focuses on data and optimizing the timing and placement of your plants and you can even have it send you emails to remind you when to plant your crops.

02 of 10

Plan-a-Garden

How to Use It: Download on desktop or mobile

Plan-A-Garden from Better Homes & Gardens offers a simple drag-and-drop builder with a 3D view of items like trees, vines, and shrubs for your landscaping beds.

To help you build your garden, the planner walks you through a wizard. First, just select a background scene from the pre-made templates, like the house you see here. Then, you can drag fences, any kind of bench, and various arbors into the scene to customize the look, and you can filter plants by by type, size, and light. Finally, you get to brush a surface onto your gardens, such as a lawn, brick path, stones, tiles, or gravel.

Your garden can be saved online so you never lose your progress. When completely finished, you're able to save the image of the garden you've made as well as export a list of the plants you've included in your garden.

Tips

GardenPuzzle is another garden planner that's very similar in layout to Plan-A-Garden.

03 of 10

Gardena’s My Garden

How to Use It: Online or mobile

Gardena's My Garden is a free, simple drag-and-drop planner that lets you add plants, architectural elements, and yard objects like a grill. The result is an approachable garden design in a hand drawn style.

You can add elements like sprinkler systems to help determine the best way to water your garden and keep it looking vibrant long after it's come alive from your initial online vision.

04 of 10

Veg Plotter

How to Use It: Online on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile

Veg Plotter is an easy-to-use online vegetable garden planner that allows you to build a plan for your garden customized to your measurements. You can add elements including beds, paths, and structures, and plan your entire planting year out based on growing seasons.

Because it's available on mobile, you can easily refer to its month-by-month plans and know when to sow, when to harvest, and which companion plants can thrive side-by-side. Plus, you can track progress to refer back to next year. The basic version is free, while the advanced version, allowing custom plant entries, costs $30 annually.

05 of 10

Gardener’s Supply Kitchen Garden Planner

How to Use It: Online or mobile

With the online garden planner at Gardeners.com, you'll scroll through the different plants and drag and drop the ones you want onto the grid that can be expanded to 5 by 12. Plant options include include cucumbers, eggplants, carrots, garlic, cilantro, lavender, leaf lettuce, hot peppers, okra, celery, melons, chives, and many more.

Once you're satisfied with your garden, you can print off the image of the garden only or include the planting information as well. It includes details on planting seeds required spacing, planting frequency, days until harvest, and tips for successful  sowing.

The planner offers pre-made garden plans for inspiration.

06 of 10

Garden Visualiser

How to Use It: Download on desktop or mobile

Marshalls Garden Visualiser is just one of the tools Marshalls offers to help you design your outdoor spaces. It does just what you'd expect a free garden planner to do — it lets you visualize your garden in 3D space. This online garden planner lets you specify exactly how large you want your garden to be, and you can even customize the shape of the ground.

Garden Visualiser asks you to add a boundary to the garden, such as fences, walls, or hedges. When ready to design your garden, you can choose from various themes or build one of your own from scratch. You can even add a picture of your home so the garden can sit beside it to give you an idea of how it will look when you build it.

Tons of products can be added to your garden with Marshalls Garden Visualiser. Some of these include paths, garden edgings, garden surfaces, summerhouses, walling, and paving. When finished, you have the option to find an approved installer to help you build the garden, or you can request information from Marshalls to order all the required products to build it yourself.

Tips

This website requires the Unity Web Player to be installed. If you can't get the website to open in your browser, try a different one like Firefox or Internet Explorer.

07 of 10

Garden Planner Online

How to Use It: Download on desktop or mobile

This free trial from Small Blue Printer allows you to add various objects along with your plants.

When ready to print your garden plan from SmallBluePrinter.com, you can choose to include the object list along with the design. This will print you off a list of every single item in your garden, complete with sizes, quantity, and a small image of the object.

Also available when you print your design is a coded system that matches up with the item list. This means you can match up the listed items with the picture to know exactly where you're going to place each object. Download the free trial for Mac or Windows. The full version costs $38.

Tips

You can print your garden plan using this online planner, but saving online is not an option. This means you must not close out of the website or you could lose your progress.

08 of 10

Smart Gardener

How to Use It: Download on desktop or mobile

The Smart Gardener Personalized Vegetable Garden Planner is similar to other vegetable garden planners but less detailed for landscapes. Instead, you can build your planting beds, lay your desired plants into them, and then print off a detailed list of everything you have in your garden.

There are square, rectangular, circular, and triangular planting beds available, all of which can be adjusted to a custom size. Adding plants is as simple as dragging them from the sidebar directly onto a planting bed.

When you're finished and ready to print your garden plan, you get the whole image of the garden plus a list of all the plants, showing the seed depth, spacing, and plant height, each with a detailed illustration of the size requirement for the bed. The cost is only $10 for 90-days of unlimited access or $30 for 360-days.

09 of 10

Realtime Landscaping Architect

How to Use It: Software for desktop

Realtime Landscaping Architect offers only a handful of trees, annuals, shrubs, and perennials with the trial version of this program, but its extensive landscaping features make it ideal for designing the pathways, terrain, water features, and buildings that you may want surrounding your garden.

This software is geared towards professional landscape architects, but provides incredibly accurate depictions of gardens for those who are savvy with rendering. The full version costs $599.

10 of 10

Uvision 3D Landscape Creator

How to Use It: Software for desktop

Another program very similar to Realtime Landscaping Architect is Uvision 3D Landscape Creator. However, there are more plants to choose from in its trial version.

This software is also geared towards landscape professionals with ultra realistic renderings and the ability to add in features including architectural elements, driveways, patios, and more. The price point for the full version is $579.95.

Frequently asked Questions

What is the best garden layout for beginners?

For beginners, a good garden layout involves planting straight, long rows from north to south. This helps maximize sunlight exposure.

How do I arrange my garden in rows?

You should start by placing the tallest plants at the north end of the row. Gradually plant shorter ones as you move south, so they all get enough sunlight.

What is the basic pattern in garden design?

A common pattern for vegetable garden design is to use rectangular areas. Whether your garden is wide or narrow, break down larger spaces into smaller rectangles for easy access and organization.

Read the original article on The Spruce