🥳 very special & timely drop: my dynamic garden calendar template! 🥳

a google sheet easily customizable for all zones

Jan 04, 2023

Friends! What a first week of 2023!

I do not put much on the social medias, but this is the little space where I am very open about my life — so here we go. This week I completed a long-time project, talked about it on TikTok, and now there are over a thousand new readers who have joined in the last 24 hours out of sheer excitement for this new garden calendar template. A THOUSAND MORE. 😱 [yes, it feels weird but also exciting]

WELCOME. 🤗 Many of you helped me bring this project to completion or just gave me so much encouragement to put it out into the world.

SO, THE PROJECT.

After spending hundreds of hours of my life in excel and google sheets, I finally. finally. finally. created something that did what I wanted: A VISUAL calendar that automatically shifted whenever I switched the zone, first frost date, or days to maturity of the crop I was growing.

There are some newly developed apps (SeedTime, GrowVeg, Farmers Almanac, etc) that are very cool — but I have ended up dropping all of them over the years because I could not customize them enough, I didn’t want to pay a re-occurring subscription, and things were ultimately always missing that I couldn’t manually add in. Google Sheets is SO much better for me because I don’t have to create another account and I can easily access it on my desktop or mobile whenever I want.

Many of you have been using my old-school manual planning template, which is handy -- but this dynamic template is like ✨ magic x a million. ✨

I personally just finished planning my spring, summer, and fall garden in under an hour and if I ever want to just re-do the whole calendar by pushing the frost date up or back one week, I just TYPE ONE THING IN. (I am genuinely so proud of this spreadsheet haha)

I have worked extra hard to have many people test it, work out bugs, get feedback, and make sure it works for multiple zones and LOOK AT WHAT EVERYONE SAID. 🙈

👩🏻 "I was about to spend $20+ on a journal and another $20 on a gardening book that wasn't specific to my zone and having to lay it out myself!" - Katie, North Carolina
👨🏼 "This is awesome!! As a mid-level gardener this is already saving me SO much time planning!” - Aubrie, Ohio
👩🏽 “Garden planning just got much less overwhelming! Lauren has made this often-dreaded part so much more approachable, and it’s perfect if you’re a visual person (like me). Now, I get to focus on the part I enjoy most: playing in the dirt.” - Jessica, North Carolina
👩🏻‍🦰 "This is VERY straightforward! I have never seen a modifiable calendar like this!" - Sara, New Jersey
👩🏻 "This is absolutely incredible. It is just KILLER! This is such a game changer for any gardener but especially myself as a beginner. I'm so impressed by how user-friendly this is." - Jordan, Colorado
👩🏼 "I have been wasting HOURS trying to figure out when to plant things. I don't know how I ever gardened without this." - Lydia, Colorado

All that being said — I WANT EVERYONE TO USE IT. It is a lifesaver.

I have decided to sell it to help fund my continued education, garden efforts, and to keep this newsletter & most of my other resources free. (PS. I just enrolled in NC State’s Garden and Landscape Certificate of Mastery program which starts on Monday and I’m really grateful to do that.)

→ If you would like this dynamic google sheets template, you can purchase it for $17 here! ←

I am going to bump it up to $27 soon to be more similar to other apps + programs on the market, but wanted as many people that I personally knew to use it first!

A few answers to common questions:

It’s easy enough for non-excel, non-spreadsheet users.
There is also a little “how to” video link included so you don’t even have to read the instructions.
You can duplicate this and use it year after year, it’s not just for 2023.
Yes, you really can use it for all zones. (Zone 1, 2, & 10 are tricky but you can do it)
You can use it as to track when seeds are started indoors, but you also can use it as a gardener purchasing everything as transplants too.
You can add plants/varieties that are missing.
You can customize Days to Maturity for unique varieties.
Crops are pre-coded as Cool, Cold, & Warm season and mid/advanced gardeners can modify these if they have preferences for their region.
I have included instructions for customizing it to locations with low-sunlight hours during certain seasons (like Alaska)

If this calendar sounds like it will help you, grab it, and let me know what you think!

If you have any questions about it, comment and I will answer!

Thank you for indulging my exciting new (and first!) product launch — and we’ll get back to regularly scheduled programming on Friday with the next newsletter. 👩🏻‍🌾

Lauren xo

PS. Nichole you were my favorite response 😂