If you hunt around online, you’ll find dozens of lists of “challenges for gardeners” and yet, many of these lists could boil down to a single bullet point “planning your garden effectively”.
If you want a great garden, then you need to ensure that everything you put in it has the right space, the right light and the room to thrive.
That’s where our free garden planners for beginners come in, these tools make it easy for you to plan your garden and they won’t cost you a penny!
Better Homes & Garden Plan-A-Garden App
As you might expect from one of the biggest brands in gardening, this app is very fully-featured.
It allows you to lay out a garden as it might be in a 3D environment and to save you from doing too much hard work – there are tons of drag and drop templates you can use for different plant species.
It’s nice that you can save the plans and then go back and edit them later, you can also export and print any plant lists you create to help you order seeds/seedlings.
Gardener’s Supply Company
If you don’t have a huge amount of garden space to go around, this is the best free planning tool there is.
It focuses on maximizing the use of the square footage available to you and allows you to drag and drop plant types all over the custom map.
We really like that they include a rainfall and soil calculator which helps you better understand the space plants require in your local conditions.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Planner
OK, technically, this isn’t free – it’s a paid plan but you do get a one week free trial and if you work quickly enough, that’s enough to get a free plan done.
They draw on a lot of extra data (which is probably why you have to pay after a week) to provide the right dates for planting certain plants in your geographic location.
To be fair, we won’t be surprised if you subscribe when the week’s free trial is up, we did.
Green In Real Life Printables
If you don’t like working online, then this is a fantastic garden planning resource.
They’ve got 62 different PDF printable worksheets that you can run off and then mix and match to create your perfect garden.
You’ll want to combine these layout sheets with a seed planting guide that helps you work out when you should plant things in your garden.
Gardena’s My Garden Planner
If you don’t like complexity in your planning process this simple planning tool might be what you need.
It’s a top-down planner that lets you drag and drop items to build a custom garden – we’d use this for idea generation before moving on to a more complex planner, later in the process.
Shifting Roots’ Garden Planner & Journal
This is a lovely printable planner and journal that makes it super easy to plan everything you need to without becoming overwhelmed.
Better still, it’s a long-term resource that can help you maintain your garden over the coming weeks and months.
Everyone should grab this, we can’t believe it’s free!
Marshalls Garden Visualizer
This is a planner on a British company’s website and it’s so much fun to use.
You can move your garden around to view it from every angle and not only does it allow you to plan the garden, it also lets you plan the landscaping of your garden.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, our picks for the most awesome free garden planners for beginners.
Planning your garden doesn’t need to be a nightmare and planning it out before you start planting will give you a much better chance of a successful harvest and happy plants!
Once you’ve planned your garden why not use one of our best plant delivery services or best online nurseries to order your plants?
And if you don’t have a garden at all, you might like our guide on how to grow your own food in the city.
