Matchbook Labs / free homestead planner printable

Free Homestead Planner — Printable Weekly Log & Garden Pages

One sheet that covers the week: a 12-row chore log with a checkbox for every day, a four-bed garden planner, and the jobs that rotate through the seasons. Print it, pin it inside a cabinet door, and start a fresh one each week.

How to use it: print one sheet per week. Write the chores on Monday morning, tick the box each day you do the work, and use the notes column for the small things you'd otherwise forget, like which tray dried out or which gate latch needs a look.

The first three rows are filled in as examples. Everything else is write-in, on purpose. Works on A4 and US Letter; grayscale prints fine.

The weekly homestead log

#	Chore	Notes
1	Coop clean-out	bedding straight to the compost
2	Water seedlings	trays by the window dry out by noon
3	Weed garden beds	20 minutes, before they set seed
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

Twelve rows is more than most weeks need, and that's the point. An empty row at the bottom is better than a chore that had nowhere to go. If a chore repeats but not weekly, write it in anyway and leave the boxes alone until it's due.

Garden bed planner

Four beds, four lines. Write the crop in the first column, the date it went in, and roughly when you expect to start picking and when it ends. Dates beat memory by months.

Bed	What's planted	Started (date)	Harvest window
Bed 1
Bed 2
Bed 3
Bed 4

Two crops can share a bed; write both on the line with the second one in parentheses. When the season ends, cross the line out and write what went in next, so the sheet reads top to bottom like the year actually happened.

Seasonal chores

The same twelve months split differently depending on what you keep and what you grow. These are the broad, common jobs for each season; skip what doesn't apply to your setup and treat the boxes as a starting list, not a rule. When the outdoor work slows down, the advent activity calendar fills December days for the kids.

Spring	Summer	Fall	Winter
start seeds under lights prune before bud break flip the compost pile plant cool-season crops fix fences and gates	water long and early weed small, weed often put up berries as they ripen check plants for pests re-sow beans and greens	cure squash and pumpkins get garlic in before frost sow cover crops on spent beds stack and cover firewood lift and store potatoes	draft next year's bed map order seeds early sharpen and oil tools inventory pantry and freezer mend gear indoors

Season boundaries move. Your spring starts when your ground does, not when the calendar says so, so shift the lists a few weeks either way without guilt.

Five record-keeping tips

Write it the day it happens. A note written on Tuesday tells you what happened Tuesday. The same note written on Sunday is what you remember on Sunday, and memory keeps the interesting parts and drops the rest.
One page, one place. Chicken notes, seed receipts, the fence repair, the feed total, all on the same sheet in the same spot. A system split across three places trains you to check zero of them.
Date everything, even the seeds. The day a packet went in the ground and the day the compost got turned are the two numbers you'll want next spring. Dates turn loose notes into a timeline.
Track only what you'll act on. If a number will never change what you do, leave the column out. Most weeks, a dozen chores and one line of notes is a complete record.
Keep the finished sheets. What went into bed 2, when the beans were done, which month the feed bill spiked, it's all on old sheets. Tossing them resets your memory to zero every January; a drawer of them is next year's plan already written.

Print tips

One sheet per week. Print a stack at the start of the season and keep them clipped together.
Print at 100% scale on A4 or US Letter. Grayscale is fine; the layout is lines and boxes, no ink-heavy fills.
Laminate one copy and use a wet-erase marker for the chore column if you'd rather not print weekly. Keep a paper copy for the notes, which are worth keeping.
Prefer typing? Copy the tables into a spreadsheet; the columns transfer as-is.

Questions people ask

Is this homestead planner really free?: Yes. Print it, copy the layout onto your own paper, or rebuild it in a spreadsheet. Nothing to install, no account, no email.
Can I use it as homestead journal pages in a binder?: That's the intended use. The tables are full-width with standard borders, so they hole-punch cleanly on both A4 and US Letter. Start a new sheet each week and the binder becomes the year's record.
The seasonal list doesn't match my climate.: It isn't meant to. The five jobs per season are the common backbone; every homestead runs its own calendar, so cross out what doesn't apply and write your own in the notes column.
What does the full journal add?: The printed pack goes to 40 pages: a season task wheel, a 12-bed garden planner, canning, freezer and dry-store logs, monthly budget boxes, egg and produce trackers, recipe cards and a 2027 calendar.

Want the full pack?

This sheet is the weekly core of the Homestead Harvest Journal 2026: a 40-page printable planner with a season-by-season task wheel, a 12-bed garden planner, preservation logs for canning, freezer and dry store, monthly budget boxes, egg and produce trackers, recipe cards and a weekday-correct 2027 calendar. A4 and US Letter.

Get the 40-page Homestead Harvest Journal →

Printable PDF, A4 + US Letter. Personal use.