This vegetable garden planner dates your whole growing season from two frost dates. Type your average last spring frost and first fall frost once, and the whole season is dated — every start-indoors date, every planting, every succession round and every first harvest. Each round is checked against your first fall frost, so the plan tells you which sowings will not make it. Then the harvest log joins your beds, so at the end of the season you see pounds per square foot and harvest value against what you spent on seed and supplies, for every bed and every crop.
This planner replaces the usual spring routine: a pile of seed packets, a frost date written on something, and a lot of counting backward on a calendar — six weeks before the last frost for the tomatoes, two weeks after it for the beans, and again every few weeks if you want lettuce all summer instead of all at once. By July nobody remembers which bed had what, or whether the garden paid for itself.
Two frost dates, a whole season of dates
On the Plan tab you pick a crop, a bed and how much space it gets. The planner looks the crop up in its built-in Crop Guide — 50 vegetables and herbs with days to harvest, how many weeks before the frost to start seed indoors, when to plant out or sow, spacing, frost tolerance, seed life and rotation family — and works out the dates from your frost dates.
Change a frost date and every calculated date in the file moves with it. Nothing is typed twice and nothing goes stale, because the planner calculates the dates rather than you typing them. Every timing is overridable: type your own date on a row and that planting follows yours, and stays put when the frost dates change.
Succession planting, frost-checked
Give a row a number of rounds and an interval, and the Succession Schedule expands it into one dated line per sowing. Every line gets its own frost check: a round that cannot ripen in time is marked Too late. “In time” means by your first fall frost for tender crops, a week after it for half-hardy ones and three weeks after it for hardy ones (all adjustable on Setup), and the Plan row says how many of its rounds actually mature. The seed count, the expected harvest and the bed space all use only the rounds that will make it, so you do not buy seed for sowings the plan says to skip.
What to do this week
This Week lists every seed start, planting and first harvest due in the next 14 days, soonest first, and says “skip” where a round is too late. Between seasons it rolls forward to next spring’s first jobs instead of going blank. The Season Calendar shows the same plan on one page: a row per planting, a letter per week (start indoors, plant or sow, harvest), ready to print and pin up.
Beds that know what they grew
Each bed gets a length and a width. The Beds tab works out the space in use at the busiest week of the season, so two plantings that never overlap are not counted twice, and a bed that is over-planted is flagged. As the Harvest Log fills up (log each pick in lb, oz or kg, or as a count (Unit: each) for crops the Crop Guide gives a weight per item; a count of a crop picked by the handful, such as beans or spinach, reads “Weigh it” instead of recording zero; totals show in pounds), each bed shows its pounds, its pounds per square foot, the harvest value at the Crop Guide’s price per pound, what was spent on it, and how much came back for each dollar.
The same join runs per crop. Spending tied to a bed or a crop lands there; whole-garden costs like the spring seed order are shared out by the space each crop used. Over-wintering crops such as garlic are left out of that share, because they harvest next season. The Dashboard ranks the crops by harvest value with what each one cost, so you can see which crops earn their bed space.
Seeds, rotation and the shopping list
The Seed Inventory checks each packet’s age against that crop’s typical seed life and tells you which packets are past it (a ten-seed germination test overrides the guess). The Seed Order then compares the seed your plan needs with the seed worth sowing and writes the shopping list: covered, order at least so many seeds, or test the old packet first.
Rotation History holds what grew where in past seasons, and the Plan flags a crop family going back into the same bed within your rotation window. There are 12 rotation families in the Crop Guide.
Try the free version first
If you would rather start with a record of what went in, the free Vegetable Garden Planting Log is one tab: your last spring frost date, then a row per planting with its bed, variety and planting date, and the expected first harvest dated from a short built-in crop list. It arrives pre-filled with the same example spring garden, and there is no signup and no email.
What it does not have is the part this workbook is for: it dates nothing from your frost dates for you, has no succession rounds and no fall frost check, and keeps no harvest, seed or bed records.
What it does not do
It does not know your frost dates — you look them up (your local extension office publishes them) and type them on Setup. Frost dates are averages, and so are the Crop Guide’s days to harvest, spacing and yields: they are starting points from general growing practice, not a guarantee for your soil, your variety or this year’s weather, which is why every timing can be overridden. There is no garden map to draw, no weather data and no notifications. The example garden inside the workbook is invented, so the numbers on the images are illustrations, not results.
Own it, don’t rent it
The harvest log and the seed inventory are part of the file, not a higher subscription tier. No account, no yearly fee, and nothing that stops working when you stop paying. It opens in Excel, in LibreOffice, and as a native Google Sheet through a one-click copy link to a Sheet that is already built, so there is nothing to import.
Plan it once in late winter, log the harvest all summer, and close the season out with a real answer to whether the garden paid for itself.
