Matchbook Labs / free garden bed planner printable
Free Garden Bed Planner — Printable Vegetable Garden Layout Template
One sheet, two halves. Page 1 is a 4x4 grid where each square takes one crop name, under a line that names the bed. Page 2 is a succession table, six rows of crop, sow date and harvest window, plus three notes lines. Print it, decide what goes where, write it down. The sheet keeps the plan; it doesn't hand you one.
How to use it: print one sheet per bed, or one sheet for the whole garden if four squares per bed is enough. Name the bed at the top of page 1 the way you say it out loud ("bed 2", "the bed by the fence"), write a crop in each square, and use page 2 to track when things went in and when they're due to come out. Works on A4 and US Letter; grayscale prints fine.
Page 1 · bed grid, 4x4, write-in
Bed:
The gray square is a fill-in demo, not a suggestion of what to grow. One crop name per square; if you split a square, draw the line and write both names. If your beds run bigger than 4x4, print one sheet per bed section and keep the bed label consistent across sheets.
Page 2 · succession table, 6 rows, write-in
| Crop | Sow date | Harvest window |
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Notes:
One row per sowing, not per crop. If the same bed gets carrots twice, carrots get two rows; the dates keep the order honest. Harvest window comes off your own seed packets, and it stays a window, not a promise: the table records what you planned and what happened, it doesn't predict either.
Four layout tips
Opinions from making garden-organization pages like this one. Take or leave.
- Tall plants on the north edge. (Opinion.) The folk rule: put the tallest crops on the north side of the bed so they stop shading everything else, and flip it if you garden below the equator. Whether it matters in your yard is something your own shade lines will tell you by mid-season, which is what the notes lines are for.
- Name beds like a person, not a spreadsheet. (Opinion.) "Bed 3" goes stale; "the bed by the fence" survives years of rearranging. The bed label line exists so the grid stays readable when you find it in a drawer next spring.
- Re-sowings get their own row. (Opinion.) Merging two sowings of one crop into a single succession row hides the one thing the table exists to show: the gap between the dates. Two rows, two dates, no memory required.
- Keep the used grids. (Opinion.) Last year's grid is next year's layout, already drawn, with the crop rotations and the shade problems marked in your own handwriting. Stack them into the garden binder next to the planting log; a new season's plan is mostly the old one with edits.
What this page is
A layout-organization sheet. It holds the plan you make: which bed, which square, which dates. It gives no growing instructions, no planting calendar, no zone chart, and no promises about how anything produces. Every field stays empty until you write your own plan in it, which is the same rule the full Garden Log follows.
Print tips
- One sheet per bed covers most small gardens. Print one per bed section if a bed runs longer than 4 squares.
- Print at 100% scale on A4 or US Letter. Grayscale is fine; the layout is lines and boxes, no ink-heavy fills.
- Hole-punch straight into the garden binder. The tables are full-width with standard borders, so they punch cleanly on both paper sizes.
Questions people ask
- Is this garden bed planner printable really free?
- Yes. Print it, copy the layout onto your own paper, or redraw it in a spreadsheet. Nothing to install, no account, no email.
- What goes in each square of the grid?
- A crop name, in your own words. The squares ship empty on purpose; the grid records what you decided to plant where, not what anybody thinks you should plant.
- Does the template tell me what to plant or when to sow it?
- No. It's a vegetable garden layout template for organizing your own plan. Sow dates come from your seed packets and your own records; the succession table just gives them rows.
- Can I use it as a free garden layout template in a binder?
- That's the intended use. Both pages hole-punch cleanly on A4 and US Letter, and page 2 starts on a fresh sheet when printed double-sided.
- What does the full Garden Log add?
- Thirty-two pages: the bed grid grows into an 18x17 garden map with a legend, beds get 12 name cards, and the succession rows become 64 planting-log lines across 8 pages, plus a watering tracker, harvest tally, seed inventory and season notes.
Want the full pack?
This sheet is the layout core of The Garden Log, a 32-page printable planner and journal for one growing season. The maker describes it plainly: "Sketch the beds, log every sowing, fill a watering circle twice a day, tally the harvest, and keep the seed tin honest." And on the advice question: "Every field is write-in. ... No treatments, no charts, no advice anywhere in the book." There's also a related free garden planting log printable if you want the day-of-planting record, and a free homestead planner printable for the weekly chores around it.
Get the Garden Log — 32-page Garden Planner & Journal →
Printable PDF, A4 + US Letter. Personal use.