Build a garden planner app with beds on a grid and your own sowing calendar
A vegetable garden plan answers two questions: what fits where, and what to do this month. A garden planner app built with Anticode can draw your beds to scale, place crops by their spacing and keep a sowing calendar from dates you enter for your own area. It runs in your browser with no network, so it doesn't know your weather or postcode; you bring the local knowledge.
The layout: beds, grid and spacing
Most home vegetable plots are a handful of rectangles, so the layout tool needs less than a design program. What it does need is scale. Enter each bed's length and width, and the app draws it on a grid where one square is a unit you choose, commonly 30 cm or one foot, the basis of square-foot gardening.
- Spacing per crop. Each plant in your list carries a spacing, and the app works out how many fit in a square or a row: one tomato, four lettuces, sixteen carrots, in the square-foot convention. You set the numbers; the model can propose starting values, which you should check against your seed packets.
- Footprint and height. Courgettes sprawl, beans climb. A note on height lets you keep tall crops on the north side (in the northern hemisphere) so they don't shade the rest.
- Paths and fixed things. Mark the water butt, compost bin and paths so the plan matches the plot.
- Drag to place. On a phone, a tap-to-select then tap-to-place pattern is easier than dragging small squares. Ask for both.
The sowing calendar is yours to fill
Sowing dates depend on your last spring frost and first autumn frost, which vary a lot by region and even by garden. The app can't look them up. Enter your two frost dates once, and give each crop rules relative to them:
| Crop | Sow indoors | Plant out or sow direct | Harvest window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tomato | 6 to 8 weeks before last frost | After last frost | From mid-summer to first frost |
| Broad bean | Optional, late winter | Early spring, or autumn in mild areas | Early summer |
| Carrot | No (direct only) | From 2 to 3 weeks before last frost, in batches | About 10 to 16 weeks after sowing |
| Lettuce | Any time in spring | Every 2 to 3 weeks | Repeating |
These are the kind of rules a seed packet gives; treat the table as an example and use your packets and local experience. From the rules, the app produces a month view ("This month: sow tomatoes indoors, prepare bed 2") and a list per bed of what's in, what's next and when.
Rotation across years
Crop rotation means not growing the same family in the same bed year after year. Ask for each crop to carry its family (brassicas, legumes, alliums, roots, nightshades, cucurbits), keep each year's plan, and warn when a bed repeats a family from last year. Saving past seasons is cheap in browser storage because a plan is just a few lines of text per bed.
Describing it to Anticode
"A vegetable garden planner for an allotment. Four raised beds, each 1.2 m by 2.4 m, on a 30 cm grid. My last frost is 10 April and first frost 25 October. Crops with spacing per square, height, family and sowing rules relative to frost dates. Tap a square, tap a crop to place it. A month view of jobs. A rotation warning when a family repeats in a bed. Earthy greens and browns, readable outdoors. Sample crops I can edit."
Anticode's model writes this as one app in the browser. Expect to adjust the crop list over a few rounds of change requests; that list is the real work. Version history keeps your recent saves, so you can try a bigger change and go back.
Where the plan lives, and what it can't know
The app runs in a sandbox with no network. Your beds, crops and seasons are saved in the browser on one device, with no sync and no sharing with an allotment partner. Ask for an export file to keep a copy at the end of each season.
- No weather, soil or frost data. Nothing is fetched; dates and rules are what you enter.
- No location. It can't use the phone's position to guess your climate.
- No notifications. It shows this week's jobs when you open it.
- No plant photos from the web. Crops are drawn in code as simple icons or colour blocks, which tend to read better on a small grid anyway.
- No shared allotment map. A plot society that wants members to see each other's plots needs shared data; that's a server, which this sandbox doesn't have.
For watering and care of the plants you already have, a plant watering tracker is the simpler tool. If the plan grows into a season-long job list, see the project timeline maker too.
Questions people ask
Does the garden planner app know my growing zone?
No. Enter your own frost dates once, and the calendar works from those.
Can it draw curved or odd-shaped beds?
Rectangles on a grid are the reliable case. Ask for L-shapes or circles and test them; complex shapes make spacing counts less exact.
Can I print the bed plan?
Ask for a print view of each bed with a key, and try it with your browser's print command.