Time to Plan

I was talking to Pat last night about how my ideas for a blog post have seemed to dry up all of a sudden.  His reply was, "It's winter."  Exactly my point.  This is the time to take action!!  I was just reading a couple of favorite blogs in Google Reader and this one caught my eye!  On About.com/gardening, they had a link to a Kitchen Garden Planner.  This planner allows you to set your garden size.  You select what you want to plant, and it automatically tells you how many plants you can grow in the selected area and gives you planting instructions.  You can then save your garden for future reference.  However, I couldn't find some of the typical garden plants such as beets, carrots, and squash.  So I searched further.





The planner at Better Homes and Gardens allows you to actually landscape just about anything in your yard, including pathways, garden furniture, planters, etc.  But once again, there is a limit to the plants you can click on to design your garden, and there is no support for a vegetable garden that I could find.  I suppose this really doesn't matter if just playing around with "the look" is the important thing.

Then I got a little smarter and googled "vegetable garden planner."  I stumbled upon a website called Vegetable Garden Planner.  This website is more my style.  It has an online "journal" which you can sign up for free.  Then all throughout the website are tons of articles to get you started.  Some features of this planner is you can upload photos, keep a journal of your garden and observations, maintain a garden "to-do" list, record when you plant and harvest crops.  Having something like this will be helpful over the years to help keep track of what does well during which season.

Honestly, I think drawing this stuff out online is kind of a waste of time.  My mother always got a legal pad, drew a rectangle, drew columns, and labeled what she would plant where.  Pat just goes out to the garden and starts digging.  I think I would use the Vegetable Garden Planner, but I also think I'd quit using it after a while.  Maybe all I need is one of those fancy journals at Barnes and Noble...hmmmm....