Companion planting & a thriving harvest
Welcome to the garden.
Plan your beds, plant the right things at the right time, and bring in the harvest.
Next to harvest
Your growing zone
Set your zone and the Plant Library tailors its timing tips to you.
Plant Library
The right plant, the right time.
Zone-aware grow tips for hundreds of crops, organized by category. Add any to your garden to start tracking it.
Companion Planting Guide
Homestead Planner
Grow enough to feed your family.
Real food security: how much to plant for a year, how to grow more in less space, and how to store the harvest through winter.
How many are you feeding?
These are homestead rules of thumb for a year’s supply of storage staples — adjust to your family’s appetite, your soil, and your season length.
Grow up, not out
The biggest yield multiplier on a small footprint is vertical growing. A bed of sprawling vines becomes several times the harvest when you send it skyward — same soil, far more food.
Trellises, arches & grow walls
Run cattle panels, netting, or string up the sunny side of every bed. Cucumbers, pole beans, peas, melons, winter squash, and indeterminate tomatoes all climb — fruit hangs clean, ripens evenly, and is easy to pick. An arch between two beds becomes a shade tunnel for greens underneath.
Hanging & container crops
Every railing, fence, and wall is grow space. Strawberries, cherry tomatoes, trailing nasturtiums, lettuce, peppers, bush beans, radishes, scallions, and most herbs thrive in hanging baskets, rail planters, and vertical pockets — turning a balcony or patio into real food.
Intensive spacing & square-foot beds
Skip wide rows. Plant on a grid at the spacing each crop truly needs and you fit far more while shading out weeds. Tuck fast crops (radish, lettuce, scallions) between slow ones (tomatoes, broccoli) and harvest the quick ones before the big ones need the room.
Succession planting
An empty square in July is wasted food. The moment one crop comes out, another goes in. Sow a little every 2–3 weeks; follow spring greens with beans, beans with fall brassicas, and slip in a last sowing of spinach or garlic before frost.
Best vertical (climbing) crops
Best container & hanging crops
The root cellar, in one minute
Storage is half of self-sufficiency. Most keepers want one of two climates: cold & moist (32–40°F, ~90% humidity) for roots and cabbage, or cool & dry (50–60°F, ~60% humidity) for onions, garlic, and squash. A corner of an unheated basement, a buried bin, or a spare fridge can all become a cellar.
Cold & moist (root cellar)
Cool & dry
When it won’t cellar, preserve it
Can tomatoes into sauce; freeze peppers, corn, peas, and green beans; dry herbs and hot peppers; ferment cabbage into kraut and cucumbers into pickles; turn berries into jam. A summer of surplus becomes a winter of real food.
Cure before you store
Most keepers last far longer if cured first: dry onions and garlic 2–3 weeks with airflow; cure winter squash and sweet potatoes in warmth (~80°F) for 1–2 weeks to harden the skins; let potatoes dry in the dark first. Cull anything bruised — one bad one spoils the bin.
Garden Designer
Design your beds for maximum yield.
Lay out each bed square by square. The designer fits crops by their spacing, totals your yield, flags companions to keep apart, and tells you where the sun wants your tall plants.
New bed
Harvest Calendar
From planting to plate.
Track what you planted, when it's ready, and what you actually brought in.
Add a planting
Pest & Disease Log
What's bugging your garden.
Log what's affecting what, what you tried, and what actually worked — so next season you remember.
The Guide
Grow with the garden, not against it.
Companion planting, simply
Plants are neighbors, and some get along better than others. The right pairings deter pests, draw pollinators, and share the soil without competing — basil beside tomatoes, beans with corn, marigolds almost everywhere. A few thoughtful pairings do more than any spray.
Right plant, right zone, right time
Half of gardening is timing. Your USDA zone tells you your frost dates, and your frost dates tell you when to start seeds, transplant, and sow directly. Work backward from the last frost and you'll stop losing seedlings to a cold snap.
Succession, not a single sprint
Don't plant all your lettuce at once and drown in it for two weeks. Sow a little every couple of weeks and you'll harvest steadily all season. The Harvest Calendar makes the staggered plantings easy to see.
Observe, then log
The best gardeners aren't the ones with green thumbs — they're the ones who pay attention. Note what thrived, what got eaten, and what you did about it. A season of honest notes is worth a shelf of books, and it's all in your hands here, encrypted and private.
Where Service Replaces Greed.
Every purchase supports the establishment and operation of The P4P Foundation currently in formation. 50% of net profit funds the mission.