Every winter I'd sit down at my computer and make a plan. A proper one. I'd spend hours on it - researching varieties, sketching out the beds, going down rabbit holes about companion planting. I'd end up with something I was genuinely pleased with. And then I'd close the laptop and more or less never open that tab again.
I'm already tired of screens. The last thing I needed was another reason to sit at one.
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I did find one app I actually liked. It could identify bugs and disease from a photo, which is exactly what you want when you're standing in front of a plant that looks wrong and you have no idea what you're looking at. That part was useful. The right job for a phone.
But taking my phone out to the garden never really worked for me. The sun makes the screen impossible. My hands are dirty. And if I'm honest, the garden is one of the few places I go specifically to not be looking at it.
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So I tried a plain notebook for a stretch. The problem there was the blank page. I'd open it and think - okay, but what do I write? A notebook with nothing in it asks you to make decisions before you've even started, and some days I had the energy for that and most days I didn't. I'd close it and go do something else.
What I actually needed wasn't more space to plan in. It was less. Something already structured, already waiting for me to just show up. The thinking done before I got there so I didn't have to do it standing in the kitchen at the end of a long day, wondering where to begin.
That's what a proper garden planner is, it turns out. Not a blank page, not a screen. Something already structured, already waiting - where the thinking is done before you get there.
What I landed on was Garden Game Plan. It's built from your actual frost dates, laid out week by week for your specific growing season. I open it, I know what the week looks like, I go outside. That's the whole thing.
