Whether you are creating a robust vegetable garden or a simple herb-and-flower patch, Lucidchart can help you determine the best way to lay out your plants to create the spring garden of your dreams.

Visualize the layout of your vegetable garden with basic shapes

You can construct a simple visual of your vegetable garden using basic shapes in Lucidchart. Simply drag the shapes onto the canvas from the toolbox on the left, then resize and rotate them as needed. 

Color can help you distinguish between the different components of your garden; for example, in the template provided, green represents the garden background, white represents the plant beds within the garden, and grey represents non-garden structures. See the next section to learn how to leverage color even more to visualize the variables that will affect your garden’s growth, such as water drainage and sunlight access.  

Note: If you want to use a measuring tool to make sure that the dimensions of your diagram are accurate, you can use walls from the Floorplan shape library instead of basic geometric shapes. 

Use Layers to visualize the effects of light and water on your garden

Once you construct the basic layout of your vegetable garden, you can take advantage of Layers in Lucidchart to visualize different variables that will affect your crops. The template provided contains two layers, representing light distribution and water drainage, that can be toggled on and off using Hotspots.

The “light distribution” layer shows the amount of direct sunlight that different parts of the garden will receive. Areas that get more direct sunlight will be overlaid with a dark yellow color when that layer is visible, whereas areas with less direct sunlight will show as a lighter yellow.

The “water drainage” layer shows which parts of the garden have soil that drains quickly vs. more slowly. When this layer is visible, beds with soil that drain more quickly will be colored light blue, whereas those that take longer to drain will be colored a darker blue. 

Light and water are not the only variables for your garden that you can visualize in Lucidchart. Some other features that you could visually represent in your diagram include climate zones and soil types. Whatever it is that you want to display, simply create a color-coded layer and a legend, and you are good to go! 

Use a timeline to map out your garden’s planting cycles

If you have experience planting and harvesting vegetables, then you know that the optimal schedule for planting your seeds and harvesting their produce varies greatly from crop to crop. It can easily become overwhelming to keep track of all the different produce cycles and know when to get your seeds and schedule their planting.  

With Lucidchart’s timeline tools and advanced color gradients, you can create a simple dashboard that will help you keep track of your garden’s schedule. The image below (click to open the full diagram to use as a starting point) shows an example of a garden produce calendar, created entirely in Lucidchart. 

Pro tip: Click the image below to use our garden timeline template!

The top part of this diagram is creating using a simple timeline shape. The bars beneath, created from interval shapes from the timeline shape library, represent the produce cycles for each crop. The green part of each shape represents the timeframe in which you are supposed to plant the vegetable’s seeds indoors. The midsection represents the period of time in which you are supposed to transfer those seeds outdoors, and the pink section corresponds with the period of time in which the plants will be ready to harvest.

You can easily select new colors for your gradient using the shape options settings in your properties bar. 

Use container shapes to group companion plants together

Some plants grow better together than others, and Lucidchart’s container shapes allow you to create visual groups of companion plants. 

The magnetization feature allows you can magnetize the vegetables to their containers so that they will all move together when you move the container shape. This feature is helpful for when you are planning out your garden, because you can move containers between beds or on different places on your timeline without having to tediously select the shapes one by one. 

Do you feel inspired and empowered to start planning your perfect garden? Spring is just around the corner, so log in to Lucidchart or click any of the templates above to get going and growing today!