Paint your vegetable bed before you plant it.

Turn a blank growing area into a simple planting map.

Set the rows and columns to the level of detail you need, search or filter the plant palette, select a plant and click cells to place it. Clicking a cell that already contains the selected plant clears it; clicking a different occupied cell replaces that planning unit with the selected plant.

If you already defined Garden Areas in My Garden, reuse one here instead of typing a slightly different bed name. Matching names are important later because harvest yield and area-level analysis depend on consistent growing-location names.

The palette now uses canonical plant names from the same seasonal dataset that powers the Planting Calendar and What Can I Plant Now. That prevents a bed layout from creating disconnected records such as “beans” when the wider system expects a specific crop such as French bean or runner bean.

The grid is a planning canvas—not a promise of plant capacity.

A grid cell does not automatically equal one plant. A tomato, lettuce and carrot use very different final spacing, and real layouts also need room for paths, trellises, airflow, access and crop spread. When a Raised Bed project is connected, Tiny Mustard Seed can show the approximate physical dimensions represented by each cell. When only a Garden Area is linked, it can show approximate area per planning cell.

Those measurements help with scale, but the final plant count should still come from crop-specific spacing and the actual planting pattern. Square spacing, row spacing, staggered layouts and support systems can produce different practical capacities in the same bed.

Use the visual planner to decide where crops belong, then use the Plant Spacing Calculator to decide how many fit safely.

Legacy plans are preserved instead of guessed.

Earlier planner versions used a small fixed palette containing some broad groups. Exact legacy crops such as Tomato, Pepper, Kale or Carrot can be safely translated to the current canonical plant format when a saved layout loads.

Generic entries such as Beans, Brassicas, Herbs and Flowers are deliberately kept as legacy cells because automatically deciding which specific plant they meant would rewrite the gardener's history. Replace those cells manually when you know the intended crop.

This migration rule keeps old plans usable while making every new placement compatible with the central plant naming system.

Vegetable garden planner FAQ