The (free) DIY Garden Planner!

“Stop!! Don’t throw out the carrot peels!!” 

Okay, backstory. A long, long time ago – back in the pre Design Lab days – Nicole and Sarah first met as co-workers for another small company (heard of Southern Weddings?). Before they had really gotten the chance to know each other Sarah was busy one day prepping her lunch, which included chopping up some fresh veg. On the way to throwing out the peels and rinds, a dear friend of ours very enthusiastically stopped her with an urgent request to not throw away the peels. Instead, I was to bag them up – as everyone in the office did – and give them to Nicole. For her compost pile. 

And that, friends, was the first thing I learned about Nicole. She’s the kind of person who recycles other people’s carrot peels. Friendship supercharged. 

Since that day we’ve shared a lot of tacos, doughnuts, laughs, and as luck would have it – gardens. Well, we don’t share a garden, but you know what I mean. A love of. 

Anyway, all things natural, growing, and outdoors are big around here, and we thought it would be fun to celebrate the coming of spring with a little freebie for our Design Lab community! 

Drum roll please….we made a free garden planner for you! All you need is a Canva account, and you can instantly download! 

You can just chuck seeds in the ground and call it a day. But as any pro gardener knows, a little planning goes a long way! 

It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, just some kind of idea of 1) what you want to grow and 2) a basic understanding of your particular climate and the place you are actually going to do the growing. Make sure you are planting according to your climate zone! Just take a peek at the back of your seed packets to see what region you are in, and you’ll see when the optimal time to plant is. 

Then, map out your garden beds (with our help of course). You’ll need to pay attention to the spacing of your plants. Some need more space to grow than others; again, all that good information will be on the back of your seed packets, don’t worry! And of course, you’re limited by the actual space of your garden bed!

Not to fear, Nicole’s got you covered. 

Our planner is totally customizable. Based on the space you’ve got, you’ll get to choose from our 8×4, 6×4, and 4×4 flower bed grids. Then you can drag and drop your “crops,” sorted by spacing needs and bloom time frames. Pretty neat, right!!

Have so many ideas and need more plants to live up to your dreams? Just duplicate a crop icon, and you’ve got limitless possibilities. (PS: this template is also a great intro to our course design kits, available in the Design Lab shop!)

Also a little bit of a Canva/design nerd? Here’s a little behind-the-scenes look at how Nicole made the garden planner. You can get more design peeks and advice on the Design Lab YouTube channel and plenty of Canva templates in the shop!

We would LOVE to see all the designs you come up with. Leave us a comment below (or schedule a chat if you’re ready to take the next step!). Cheering you on!