Well, there's a story for Garden Map/Plan in Growstuff's tracker saying that we want to do that sometime in future, but it's a long way off at present :) In the meantime you could try PlanGarden or SmartGardener or GrowVeg which might do what you want. I think one of them (SmartGardener?) was US-only though. You don't have to be in the US though; I certainly signed up, but IIRC I lied and said I was still in San Francisco, and just ignored the northern hemisphere weather info and planting advice and stuff.

Btw, these and other gardening websites are listed on the Similar Projects page on the Growstuff wiki.

SmartGardener is what I've been using, though they only do small eating things…no features for laying out and companioning an orchard (which I really want!)

SmartGardener is great if you live in the US, but a lot of its tools are kind of useless if you don't. I've not seen anything that's non-region specific like that, unfortunately.

If you're looking for something that automatically arranges it based on your sun direction, then yeah, you hit regional issues. But Smart Gardener does allow you to drag and drop things where you want them, so you can use it as something that's like an advanced version of the "draw boxes on graph paper and cut out other pieces of graph paper and shove them around" method that gets used for figuring out furniture arrangements inside a house.

I must admit I really enjoy using actual graph paper. I have a grid notebook and I find it very relaxing to draw garden and/or house plans (sometimes for real stuff, sometimes for my fantasy house/garden) in them.

My other half won't write on anything BUT graph paper, especially if he's planning something spatial. Even if he's not drawing to scale, he still prefers graph paper.

I tend to use the drawing program Omnigraffle on my Mac, which is my equivalent of graph paper. There are downloadable basic gardening stencils on Graffletopia (and Visio gardening stencils elsewhere which can be imported into Omnigraffle).

There are a bunch of fancier planning tools but the energy it takes me to enter things into them seems to personally yield little-and-diminishing return. So… I end up using Omnigraffle.

The one feature I've not yet found in a garden planning tool and might actually gain a lot of utility from is a way of denoting the duration of a crop… I can grow annual veggies year 'round here and I need some way of easily keeping track of when which beds and containers will likely need cleaup, amendment and then be freed up for the next rotation of planting… and to store the crop rotation and soil-amendment history of that bed or container, along a time-axis.

Thanks everyone:-)

Skud, I saw those links on the wiki, but it's just a list—I was after a bit of subjective opinion:-) It looks to me though, as though SmartGardener was the one of those options I hadn't checked out:-) So I'm looking at that one too…

I like the idea of doing it on paper, I just know that if I do, it will be yet another bit of paper around here, likely to be found by a child and used for a masterpiece:-) So if I can do it virtually, it'll be easier for me to keep being able to find it:-)