Garden Layout Planner

No. Every measurement sits in a field you can type into, in centimetres or in feet and inches, and the arrow keys shift a selected bed a centimetre at a time. If you have already been out with a tape measure, typing the numbers in is far quicker than nudging shapes around with a mouse.

A bed fills with a square grid at the published spacing for that crop, and every crop in the panel links straight to its own guide if you want to see where the figure came from. The count is a deliberately tight one: stagger the rows yourself and you will fit more in than the number says.

Because no spacing figure is published for them. Mint runs and will take a whole bed, so it is grown as a contained clump; fruit trees are spaced by their rootstock rather than by one number. Those crops go in the bed with a line explaining why there is no grid under them, rather than a figure invented to fill the gap.

Yes. Each crop has a "How many" field. Type 30 into a bed that would hold 384 carrots and you get 30. The plants keep their published spacing and the crop is simply given less ground, so the rest of the bed stays empty and available for something else. Anything still set to fill the space takes the ground you free up.

Enter a postcode or pick a region and the beds start showing timing. Tomatoes, courgettes, French beans, basil and potatoes are the crops whose sowing and planting hang on the last frost, so those are worked out for your own region and say so on screen. Everything else shows a broader seasonal band marked as UK guidance, with the sowing months written underneath, so you can see at a glance which kind of answer you are looking at.

Every date here is a band rather than a day, and a regional band is an average your own ground can overrule. Frost tracks altitude, shelter and distance from the sea far more closely than it tracks postcodes: a frost hollow at the bottom of a garden can stay in frost well after the open ground above it has thawed. Treat the bands as the shape of your season and your own plot as the tiebreaker.

Yes, if you tell a bed what grew in it last year. The warning comes with the reason attached: clubroot in brassicas and white rot in onions both persist in soil for years, which is what makes moving them worth the trouble. Blight does not work that way, so nothing here will tell you rotation solves it.

Where two crops in a bed have a companion-planting claim between them, the claim comes with how well it is evidenced: tested, traditional, disputed, or shown to do harm. Most companion advice in circulation has never been tested at all, and knowing which kind you are looking at is the useful part.

Each bed's timeline marks the months when everything in it has finished, and lists what could still be sown then. A bed that empties in late summer is worth planning for rather than leaving bare, whether that means an overwintering crop or a green manure to hold the ground through a wet winter.

Yes. Print drops the interface and prints the plan on its own, with a measuring bar, a north arrow, a key and a plant list, then a close-up of each growing space at a size you can set plants out from. The bar on the paper measures a metre at the ratio printed beside it, so you can take a rule to the sheet and trust what it tells you. It sizes itself to fit A4 or US Letter, and tells you when a plot is too big to come out legibly on one sheet. For a PDF, use your browser's print dialogue and choose "Save as PDF"; for a single picture to share, Plan → Save the plan as a picture.

Plans are saved in your browser as you work, which means a plan lives on the device that made it. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account to sign into. It also means a plan can be lost: clearing your site data removes it, private browsing will not keep it, and phone browsers sometimes clear storage on their own if you leave a site alone for long enough. If a plan matters, download it as a file. The file is ordinary text you can open and read, and opening one always adds a new plan rather than overwriting a plan you already have.

Yes. Fences, hedges and walls are in the Boundaries group; paths, paving, decking, grass, gravel and a pond are in Ground and paving; greenhouses, polytunnels and cold frames sit with the growing spaces and take crops of their own, with the timings adjusted for being under cover. Non-rectangular plots are handled too: click the boundary line on the plan and drag its corners to match the shape you actually have.

It works out nothing about shade: where a crop's sun requirement is published it shows on the bed, but the tool has no idea what your greenhouse shades at four in the afternoon. A plant count also assumes one crop occupying the ground at a time, so catch-cropping between slow rows is not something a bed can show. And laying a plan out wants a decent-sized screen. On a phone you can open a plan, look at it, tap anything to change its size or its crops, and print it, but dragging beds into place with a fingertip is desktop only.