SMALL SPACE, TIGHTER MARGINS
Less room doesn't mean less planning
Container gardening gets sold as the easy version. Truth is, it's the unforgiving one. Three or four decisions carry your whole harvest.
A long bed can absorb a mistake in the row next door. A 15 inch pot can't. Whatever is sitting in it in July is your July. So the sowing date and the pull date matter more than the seed you picked.
Six hours of sun on a deck is rarely the whole deck, and the spot that gets it moves through the season. Containers can follow the light, which means you may need to move them as the season progresses.
Pull a crop with nothing ready to take its place and a third of your growing space sits empty for a month. On a patio there's no spare row to make it up in.
HOW PATIO GARDENERS USE SEEDTIME
Four steps, then the season runs itself
Type in your zip code and Seedtime pulls your average first and last frost dates and the length of your season. Every date on the rest of this page is worked out from your frost dates, not from a seed packet’s national average.
Lay out your containers at their real sizes in the layout planner. Fill them using square foot gardening squares, default intensive spacing, or your own spacing in inches, so you know how much to grow before you sow.
Choose from 9,705+ built-in crops and varieties. Seedtime schedules the whole chain backwards from your frost dates: sow inside, transplant, first harvest, and the day the container comes free again.
Today’s tasks are three taps away on your phone, each tagged with the crop and the container it belongs to. Anything you miss collects in Overdue with the date it was due, so a busy week never turns into a lost month.
WHAT COUNTS AS A BED
A pot is a bed. So is every tier of a GreenStalk.
Seedtime doesn't care whether your growing space is an acre or eighteen inches across. Draw each container at its real size and it fills in the spacing and the plant count for you. Vertical planters go one step further: crops are assigned pocket by pocket across every tier, so a single GreenStalk can carry five crops on five different schedules.
The free plan holds one layout with up to 8 rectangular beds. Round pots, GreenStalk tiers and the other shapes come with full bed-shape access on the paid plans.
THE PATIO MULTIPLIER
One 15 inch pot. Three crops. Eight months of picking.
This is the whole trick to a small space. And it's exactly what a planting calendar is for - knowing the day one crop comes out so the next one is already started and waiting.
[[ cropNote ]]
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Gardeners growing in pots, not acres
“Seedtime makes gardening easy and fun. Simple plans and quick layouts. Small or patio garden, no problem. If you are into gardening or if you struggle to grow things throughout the year, Seedtime is definately worth a look!”
“I was very overwhelmed with starting a new garden and wanted to quit until I learned about Seedtime. I started using Seedtime with only two GreenStalk Vertical planters and now I have five GreenStalks and four raised beds.”
“The Seedtime program has helped me so much in my small space... I am 62 and used to have a large garden. I can now produce the same amount in my small space. This is HUGE to me.”
“I am mainly a container backyard gardener. I do plant some along the borders of my yard. I really enjoyed the rotation of crops, I can do that even in containers. I like the mobility of the garden.”
WHAT IT COSTS
A patio garden fits inside the free plan
“And yes, there are options to upgrade for a cost, but the FREE product is incredible!!... Right now I only have a small area and doing container gardening, but I’m loving it already!!”
SandMann · May 2024 · TrustpilotNon-rectangular bed shapes (round pots, GreenStalk tiers) and the 8 bed cap, if you're running dozens of separate containers. Both come with Basic at $7 a month billed yearly, or Unlimited.
Compare plansGOOD TO KNOW
Patio gardening questions, answered
Yes. A pot, a rail box, a grow bag and a raised bed are all just spaces to be drawn and planted, and every date Seedtime schedules comes from your frost dates rather than from the size of your garden. The free plan covers one layout with up to 8 rectangular beds.
Yes. Vertical planters are planned pocket by pocket across every tier, in the same layout as the rest of your patio, so each pocket can carry its own crop on its own schedule. Non-rectangular bed shapes, GreenStalk tiers included, come with full bed-shape access on Basic and Unlimited.
Set the container’s real size and Seedtime works out how many plants fit, using square foot gardening squares or your own spacing in inches. Knowing the count before you sow is the difference between six healthy plants and twelve crowded ones.
Yes, and on a patio that's the whole point. One calendar covers your whole year, so a spring crop, a summer crop and a fall crop in the same pot are three plantings on one timeline, each with its own sowing, harvest and pull dates. Unlimited planting schedules are included on the free plan.
Raised beds and kitchen gardens planned around your real schedule, not a seed packet’s best guess.
See how HomesteadersFood-scale planning: succession waves, preservation crops and harvest tracking for the pantry.
See how Market farmersSequence plantings and harvest windows so the farm stand never sits empty all season.
See howStart with the pots you already have
Create your free account, draw your containers, and let Seedtime tell you what to sow this week and what comes out to make room for it.
Plan My Patio Garden FreeFree forever · No credit card required
Seedtime is the free online garden planner for real gardens - a personalized planting calendar, a garden layout planner with square foot gardening built in, and AI planning tools for vegetable gardens, flower gardens, raised beds, and vertical planters.