A Printable Planting Guide

The seed packets got their labels, the spice jars got theirs, and then I ran out of things to letter — until I looked at the scraps of paper stuffed in the greenhouse door. Sowing dates on the back of an envelope. A note about which tomato went in which bed, written on a seed packet that's since gone in the bin. So this is the fix: one sheet, one plant, everything in the same place.

It's A4, drawn in the same botanical-plate style as the rest of the Peas & Quiet Kitchen Garden set — soft cream ground, deep green rules, and a few engraved illustrations tucked into the corners: the watering can, a truss of cherry tomatoes, a tomato under a cloche, a bundle of thyme, wellingtons by the door, and a ladybird sitting on the growth tracker.

The sheet is laid out in seven parts:

• Planting calendar — a twelve-month grid with rows for sow seed, plant out, water well, feed, pinch out and harvest. Shade the months in and you can see the whole year for that plant at a glance.
• Plant information — name, variety, type (annual, perennial, biennial, climbing), days to harvest, height, spacing, and sun: full sun, part sun or shade.
• Soil & spot — clay, loam, sandy or chalk, what you improved it with, bed or container, and drainage.
• Sowing details — sown and planted-out dates, direct sow or under cover, depth, location, and companions.
• Watering & feeding — how often you water, whether you feed monthly, fortnightly or with comfrey, and a line for mulch.
• Growth tracker — nine rows of date, height, and observations, for the running record.
• Notes — the rest of it.

Print it single-sided on ordinary A4, or on something a little heavier if it's going to live in the greenhouse. I fill one in per variety and keep them in a ring binder by the door, so the tomatoes from two summers ago are still there to argue with.

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🌿 Download the planting guide (PDF) — one A4 page, print-ready. Anyone with the link can open and download it.