The vegetable garden planner that runs on your real frost dates.
Sketch your beds and drop in your crops. GardenDraft works out sowing, transplant, and harvest dates from NOAA frost normals for your ZIP code, then keeps the whole season on one calendar.
One garden is free for good, no credit card. Grower lifts the caps for $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year.
From bed sketch to planting calendar.
Set your location
Type in your ZIP code. GardenDraft finds the climate-normals station behind your calendar, then lets you override the dates if your yard runs colder or warmer than the station.
Design your beds
Drag plants onto raised beds, in-ground rows, or containers. Spacing, snap-to-grid, and companion hints show up while you work, so crowding is visible before you buy seedlings.
Plant on schedule
Every planting gets its own sowing, transplant, and harvest window on one season timeline. Add reminders when you want a nudge before a window closes.
Built on your local frost record.
USDA zones tell you what survives winter, but they are a blunt tool for spring timing. GardenDraft looks up the climate-normals station nearest your ZIP code, reads both frost anchors from its record, and shows that work on the calendar so you can check the math yourself.
- The station has a name. For ZIP 05401 it’s Burlington Intl AP in Vermont, and the card says so.
- Safer dates come first: frost-free 9 years out of 10, with the 50% climate normal beside them.
- If your yard runs colder than the station, set your own dates and the calendar follows. The last frost date guide covers the method.
Every planting on one timeline.
Each planting draws a bar from first sowing to last harvest, broken into stages: starting indoors, hardening off, transplanting, direct sowing, harvest. Succession chains stack up as ×2 and ×3 rows. The planner also checks days to maturity against your first fall frost, so a late round that won’t finish gets flagged before you sow it.
- Set a crop to re-sow every couple of weeks and see which rounds still fit the season.
- A weekly task list covers sowing, hardening off, transplanting, and harvest, with optional email reminders.
- Any garden can be exported as a calendar feed or a printable PDF garden book.
A plant database that cites its sources.
Click a plant on the canvas and the inspector opens beside it. Varieties are listed with days-to-maturity ranges from named seed vendors, so an “early” tomato comes with an actual number. Companion suggestions state the reason for the pairing, whether that’s pest deterrence or biofumigation, and the notes behind them come from published extension and research work.
The catalog covers 678 plants and 2,854 named varieties, each with spacing, sun, and zone ranges checked against your own zone.
The full library is free to browse without an account: explore the plant library.
A layout editor that works with your thumb.
Most garden planners were built for a desktop mouse, with a cramped mobile view bolted on afterward. This one was drawn for touch from the start. Pinch to zoom, drag to pan, snap plants to the grid, and pick plants from a bar sized for one hand.
- Snap to a plain grid or 12” square-foot cells. Spacing uses each plant’s real footprint.
- Undo and redo anywhere.
- At a desk you get marquee select, ⌘/Ctrl-scroll zoom, and arrow-key nudges in 1” steps.
Walk the bed before you dig it.
The same plan, one tab over. Beds rise to their real height and plants grow to their listed spread, which makes it easy to spot a tomato row that would shade out the herb box. Drag the sun slider to preview how shadows fall through the day.
- Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, right-click to pan.
- The compass stays in the corner, so the view matches how your yard actually sits.
The free garden is the whole product.
Plenty of planners put the useful parts behind a subscription, then lock your garden the day you stop paying. GardenDraft doesn’t. The free tier is capped on size rather than features, and cancelling never takes your work away.
Every feature on the free garden
No credit card and no trial countdown. Your first garden, up to 3 beds, runs the full toolkit: frost-aware dates, the 3D view, companion hints, succession, reminders, the journal, and PDF exports. Grower lifts the cap to unlimited gardens and beds, and that is all it does.
Cancel without losing your work
Stop paying and editing pauses. Your plans, photos, journal entries, and harvest history stay viewable, and resubscribing picks up where you left off.
Your records stay yours
The Garden Book PDF and calendar feeds keep working after you cancel. Years of garden notes shouldn't sit locked behind a renewal.
See how that compares with trial-only and subscription-gated planners on the planner comparison.
A free plant library, planting calendars, and growing guides
Open to everyone, no account needed.
Built from years of garden notes.
GardenDraft is made by a small team that has lost seedlings to late frost, forgotten what went in the back bed, and learned the hard way that a pretty layout is useless if it ignores timing. The app is opinionated about dates and spacing, but it leaves room for the gardener to know the yard.
Sketch your first bed today.
Draw a bed, drop in a few plants, and you’ll have a planting calendar for your ZIP code before you close the tab.
One garden stays free. Grower is $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year, and you can cancel whenever you like.
Not ready to sign up? Get planting reminders and new growing guides for your zone by email.