How to Make Your Own Garden Planner | 5 Steps

Hundreds of people have paid me to help them plan their garden. And today I'm going to show you how you can take a simple notebook and create your own garden plan in the same way that a pro would. So I've been working as a garden consultant since 2015. That's a really long time. And the biggest demand, the thing that people would ask me for the most was a plan they wanted, like a planting plan, a tending plan, a calendar plan. Like you guys gardeners, they're planners. And honestly, that's kind of my weakness. So over the years, I've made all kinds of plans for clients, for myself and for students, with our Kitchen Garden Academy students. And over the last year, I've been working with my team and we finally got this into a system, a four season system. So we just got these in, and there's a planner for each and every system. And today I'm going to show you how you can make your own just like this, just like our seasonal system, how you can take a little notebook and you can create a system just like the one I've developed. So this is going to be five sections, and I'm going to walk you through each and every one of these sections. I can take a little composition notebook, grab a pen, and make your own planner for each and every season. It's so awesome. All right, so the first section of your planner is what I'm going to call the big picture. And this is for the season, for each month in the season. Most seasons are going to be three months. You're going to get a big picture. And this is four sections. It's what you're going to plan, what kind of plants you're going to be planning for, what you're going to plant, what you're going to tend, what you're going to harvest. For the most part in gardening, those are the four things we're doing. We're either planning, we're planting, tending, or harvesting. So this is your spot for every month you want to make a list, a big picture list. Like in this month, before the month gets done, I got a planned plant, tend and harvest these specific plants. All right, so that's the first section, a big picture. Divide your planner into these four squares and put plan, plant, tend, and harvest. Then you're going to fill out the list for that month. Just one month at a time. All right, Just one month at a time. You'll do a whole season together, but one month at a time. Next, if this is a planting month for you, so if this is the first month of that season. Then you want to make your planting plans. So you're going to take some grids, draw out some grids in your planner, and. And start to lay out where the plants are going to go in your garden. So you're going to put little circles, little colors. However, you want to lay out all those plants that you put on that big list on your big picture list. Now you want to get them on paper, on a grid so you can see where they're going to fit into the garden. All right, that's step two is literally making the planting plan. Where are the plants that you put in your big picture? How are they going to go into the garden? Get this out on paper in your planner. Trust me on this one. It's going to to help. All right, now you're going to take your big picture list for the month. The planning, the planting, the tending, and you're just going to break it into little bitty parts. You know that. How do you eat an elephant? Oh, I mean, why did we even talk about that? That's gross. But, you know, you do it one bite at a time. Same thing with the garden. You're going to do it one little task at a time. So a couple of examples is like order your seeds, measure your soil temperature, get a soil test, get your seed starting supplies, break it into little bitty things. Have you read the book Atomic habits? The whole idea. I took this whole planner idea from that concept of little bitty steps, little bitty minute things you can do once, like just one day in the month. And it's going to all add up to making a huge difference. So take your big picture plan, plant, tend, harvest, and then put them into a task list for the month. You should have 30, 31. Now, if you only want to do garden things like on a Saturday, that's fine. On a Saturday, you could check off four or five, six or seven right there. Okay, so make your little list your task list. And I love giving myself a little box, you know, a little done where you can check it off. I think they've literally scientifically proven that that creates dopamine in the brain when you put a check mark in a box. I don't know why, but it works. And then I also give ourselves a little date so you can remember what date you did these things. All right, so make your task list. This is based off of your big picture. All right, now you want to have your tracker. So this is where you are tracking that every week. You're taking Care of the core things. This again. It's that little, I feel good about myself. And you just have a little habit tracker where you list the thing that's most important for taking care of your garden that month and give yourself a little box that you can check off and you don't have to do them every single day. But I don't know if you've heard this is back to that atomic habits idea. If you get in the steps of just always checking a box off, it's super gratifying and it builds that loop in your mind of like, do the action, get the reward. This is the reward, just literally checking it off. So do a little habit tracker for each week. The things that are most important to you, we'll walk through them. But at least these five key things, watering, pruning, defending, supporting and feeding. Those are the five things you want to be sure you're doing every single week to be sure your garden like doesn't die, you know, so just check off those habits and then you can also, you know, set like key goals for each week within the month from your big picture. If you don't want to get that like, you know, hype on it, then you can at least just do the habit tracker that's going to keep you on task and just help, you know, oh, shoot, like I haven't watered in five days. So habit tracker, that's the next step. And the final section is your notes section. I have one of my clients to thank for this. When I first started my business, I was taking care of all these gardens and lots of new gardeners. And I went and visited this gardener, she was one of my favorites. And she had a journal just like this when I got there. And she had taken all these notes, all these plant specific notes within the month. So she had like a July note section and August note section and she was noting the things that were most important to do in those months. I'm like, ding, ding, ding. This is amazing. So we do this in our planner where we literally just give the details of each task, right? So like here are the key things to remember when you're chitting potatoes. Here are the key things to remember when you're cutting potatoes, when you're planting your large plants, when you're putting in the medium sized plants, when you're planting radishes. But this is a place just to give yourself notes where you can just come back and remember like, oh yeah, that did not work well when I prune that way or I need to make sure I definitely don't forget to prune, you know, when it's this particular kind of temperature or when I'm about to go on vacation or whatever. So this is your note taking section, and this is what you can come back to to be your guide for the next month or the next time time you come around to this season. All right, so once you've created those five sections, here's where the magic comes into the planner. So the way I design this is every single season has three main a planting month, a tending month, and a harvesting month. We're always planting, tending, and harvesting at the same time. But each month has a theme, like a main focus. Right at the start of the season, you're planting. In the middle, you're mostly tending, and at the end you're mostly harvesting. So, so the sections we just talked about, you're going to repeat these three times inside one notebook so that you have 30 days planned out for month one, 30 days for month two, and 30 days for month three. Now suddenly you have a daily plan. When you wake up, any day of the week, any month of the season, you can wake up, look at your planner and have a list like, I don't know if this has happened to you, but I'll wake up and think, I can garden today. Yay. And then I'm like, what do I do in the garden? I mean, it looks like a mess out there. So then I'm like, okay, Nicole, focus. Look at the planner. I can go do this step right here. So this gives you a list for the entire season. So any day that you're ready that you can get out to the garden, you've got a plan. So you're going to put those five sections three times in the notebook, and then you've got one whole season. Now here's the magic. Depending on where you live, most of us, we've got four, four seasons in the garden. So you can do this for every single season. So we did this for the cool, for the warm, for the cold, and for the hot. So here, once you put all these together, you're going to have 12 months worth of garden plans, each with these five sections included, three times. So you could have four different notebooks, one for each season, and they'll all keep you on track all year long. So now you got to go down to the store, grab yourself some composition books and start making your own seasonal planners. And if you want to skip that and just grab ours, we would be happy to send them to you. We'll put a link below this video and you can get them right here. Now. I've just had probably my most successful year in the garden since I moved here to Nashville, but life has never been busier. I got four kids, three of them were in high school, one just left for college. It's been crazy. But I've been able to keep up with the garden this year because every time I had a little moment, I had my planner that I could look at for it to boss me around, tell me what to do, and then give me that gratification when I check that box off. So I know you're gonna love having your garden all planned out for the year too. So go get your notebook and make your own planner or grab ours right here.

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