Gardeners Are Using Google Sheets to Plan Their Gardens – Here’s How to Get the Most Out of It

It’s easy to think of nature and technology as opposite sides of a coin, and people tend to pick a side. Nature reflects the world before humans made an appearance, while technology means using machines to make our passage through life easier. If you’re on nature’s “side,” you ride a horse rather than a Harley, leave your phone at home as you hike the Himalayas, and write your novel in long hand.

But of course, it’s not so cut and dried. Many of us love nature but keep our phones in our backpacks when we hike. These days, people are even using technology to organize their interactions with nature and gardening with technology is becoming more common.

In fact, one of our colleagues used Google Sheets to plant her spring bulb garden, a trick you might want to try. Alison Innes, the Content Operations Manager for Future plc, planned her bulb garden using this online tool that helped sort and organize her bulbs by height, flowering time and color. This could work for creating formal flower beds or vegetable patches. Ready to get started?

Garden Planning With Spreadsheets

You can use either Google Sheets or Excel to create your planning tool, so pick the one you use more or understand better. If you’ve never used either, both apps will walk you through the process, and it helps to have this overview before you begin.

Google sheets offers a beginners’ guide that can help you learn all the functions of the application. And Louisiana State University's AgCenter has a great system for calculating succession planting and harvest times with an Excel spreadsheet. Each has different features for alternative types of planners.

To make a garden plan like Alison did, you just need the free Google Sheets application and a little time. You will be able to easily plan a vegetable garden layout or a lovely cut-and-come-again flower bed in no time.

Creating a Spreadsheet

Many of us “design” our garden beds on paper before heading to the garden store. Our garden plan may be as simple as a list of seeds to plant outside and bulbs we want to install. We might even list out the colors and sizes of each plant in order to site it appropriately. Generally, we orient taller plants toward the north, shorter ones to the south, and bushy plants along the borders.

Online spreadsheets make all this easy, and the first steps are similar to doing it on paper – except that you can use an online spreadsheet to write it all down. A great benefit of using a spreadsheet is that the whole document is keyword searchable and can be edited as many times as needed.

You will will to list the plants you want to include and the characteristics and factors that will impact placement. These will include color, of course, and also the size and shape of the plants. It’s also a good idea to note the bloom season.

Make a Garden Map

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Create a garden map online using a grid system. Measure the beds, then assign a dimension to each square in the grid. Typically, each square represents one square foot, but you can assign a different measurement if it works better for you. The design online will reflect the shape of your garden bed. For example, if your bed is three feet wide and 15 feet long, the grid garden would be three spaces by 15 spaces.

Create a legend to identify the different plants. List the names of plants you intend to install, then assign each an indicator – this could be a letter or it could be a color. If you are going to plant different varieties of a plant, you can use a color for the type of plant and a letter for the variety. For example, you could use yellow to indicate a tomato, then a “ch” in the square to indicate cherry.

Place the different plants in your grid garden using the indicators. For example, if you decide to place pansies along the south end of the garden and assign purple to pansies, make those squares in your grid garden purple. Assign as many pansies to each square as space allows – for example, if the seeds are to be planted 3 inches apart and your grid square is 12 inches square, each square can hold 9 pansies.

Online garden tools give you many other options for garden planning. Once you start using technology to help with garden planning, you may enjoy exploring the endless possibilities.

Garden Planning Essentials