Guides

A vegetable garden planner that fits the garden you have

6 September 2026

Planning software likes rectangles. Real gardens are a balcony of pots, a raised timber bed and a row that is never quite straight. A planner that cannot hold all three will be abandoned the week the first tray of lettuce goes in.

What the planner must know

• Each bed or pot: size, soil, purpose — food, mixed, or ornament.
• Each planting: sown on a date you typed, not a date the app invented.
• A harvest window drawn from sourced maturity figures plus those dates.
• What occupied the bed last year, so you do not put tomatoes on tomatoes out of habit.

TeddyGreenFingers lets you plan a bed square by square, or keep the list. Both work. The app works out when a bed is inside a harvest window and puts watering and jobs on the morning list instead of leaving them in your head.

Climate is not a dropdown labelled “zone”

Generic USDA-style advice is a poor fit for a maritime garden. On the Portuguese Atlantic coast you can still be picking tomatoes in September while inland nights have already turned. The library in the app carries sowing and harvest windows calibrated for that coast. The plants, pests, diseases and remedies themselves apply wherever you garden.

If you want a month-by-month starting point for Portugal, use the September planting note and the calendário de sementeiras.

Planning without the bluff

Garden apps are famous for confident nonsense: a sowing date with no source, a companion pairing copied from a blog, a yield that assumes a glasshouse you do not have. TeddyGreenFingers marks estimates and leaves blanks. An empty field is information. It tells you we did not know.

A planner is only half the job. The other half is the journal that records what you actually sowed and picked, so next year’s plan is built on last year’s garden rather than last year’s optimism.