I hope all you gardening folks are as excited as I am this Spring.  My living room window (and half the floor area) are already crowded with plants just itching to get their roots into the outdoor garden soil.

Thyme

Now hold on to your green thumb for a sec,  before you get the shovel out, you need to create a layout of your garden patch.

This is where I have come across a jim-dandy web-tool to help you do just that.  No more writer’s cramp and numerous crumpled pieces of paper tossed aside while you try to perfect your ‘to scale’ drawing.

This web-tool does everything for you! From creating an actual to scale graph-paper style layout of your garden (to the specs you insert) to adding shapes and colours and then inserting the vegetable plants you select from a menu, which in turn tell you when you can safely plant them (after the last expected frost date for your area) and down to how close they should be together! Ingenius! Where the heck was this website last year?!

Here is what my garden looks like…

Now it was tough to get the pool shape correct due to just having a circle shape button to work with, but you get the idea…

So where is this wonderful website you ask? Look no further than here at Mother Earth News.  I tell you, it is the best thing since sliced bread….no wait, it’s better than the toaster that toasts sliced bread!

You need to create an account (you can use it free for 30 days, then it costs $25.00 CDN for a year) or just create what you need, print, and your done!).  All you need do is plug in your zip/postal code, and it goes from there.  It will tell you what plants to plant when, what plants play well with others and what you shouldn’t plant beside each other.  Sow dates, harvest dates and even crop rotations year after year! Fabulous I tell you! I had so much fun playing with it this morning that I have gotten nothing else done but that and this post…oh, any maybe a couple cups of tea down the hatch.