02 Plan Your Garden

02 Plan Your Garden

📸 Photos coming. The planner’s worked example uses Gus’s actual balcony layout.

Every shopping decision flows from the layout. How many emitters you buy, how much tubing you cut, how many solenoid valves you wire, whether you need one 6-way T or two — all of it falls out of where the pots actually sit. The planner replaces a tape measure, a notebook, and a page of arithmetic with a canvas you drag your garden onto. Plan first; then buy.

Use the planner below

Drag a container from the toolbar onto the grid — round pot, square pot, rectangle bed, or custom rectangle. Click any container to set its size, label, zone, and emitter count. Group containers into zones by water need (we’ll explain in a minute). When you’re done, the planner counts every fitting, totals the tubing, and gives you a “Build my Amazon cart” button that fills your cart with the right ASINs in the right quantities. Your layout auto-saves to this browser; click Reset if you want to start over. If the canvas comes up blank, refresh the page once.

Open the planner in fullscreen →

Worked example: Gus’s balcony

My balcony is 4 feet deep by 16 feet wide, east-facing, covered roof, glass railing along the long edge. Three crops, three watering rhythms, so I knew up front it would be three zones.

I drew the balcony first — a 4×16’ rectangle, snapped to the 1-foot grid. Then I worked left to right, because the lettuce sees morning sun first and I wanted the planner to match the way I actually walk the balcony with a watering can.

In the left third I dropped three round pots and labeled them “Lettuce 1”, “Lettuce 2”, “Lettuce 3”. I assigned all three to a new zone called “Lettuce” and left them at one emitter per pot — small pots, shallow roots, even surface watering, no need for two emitters. Three pots, three emitters.

Across the middle and into the right third I dropped ten round 5-gallon pots for the cherry tomatoes. New zone, “Tomato”. I changed the emitter count on each pot to two, on opposite sides of the stem — tomatoes are heavy drinkers and a 5-gallon pot is wide enough that one emitter leaves half the root ball dry. Ten pots, twenty emitters.

At the far right I dropped a rectangle for the raised wooden bed and labeled it “Bed”. Third zone. The bed is one container in the planner but five emitters along the row: two in the peas-and-beans section, one at the marigold/nasturtium midpoint (set to a slow drip — flowers like leaner conditions), one for the marigolds, one for the black radishes at the far end.

When I committed the layout, the planner counted what I’d built: 14 plants, 28 emitters, three zones, around 30 feet of 1/4” tubing, one 6-way T fitting, three solenoid valves. The BOM totaled about $170 in parts. I clicked “Build my Amazon cart” and ordered the lot.

Your balcony is almost certainly not shaped like mine. The point isn’t the rectangle — it’s the workflow. Draw the space, drop the containers, group them into zones, let the planner count.

Zones, explained

A zone is one solenoid valve, which is one watering schedule, which is one moisture sensor. Multiple containers can share a zone as long as they want roughly the same watering rhythm. Pick zones by water need similarity, not geographic proximity:

If two crops have different rhythms, give them different zones — even if they’re physically next to each other.

Why not one giant zone? Because plants disagree about how much water they want. Watering tomatoes daily kills nasturtiums; watering nasturtiums daily underwaters tomatoes. One schedule per zone is the freedom that makes this build worth doing — and it’s the reason the planner asks you to assign every container to a zone before it’ll generate the parts list.

Emitter math

How many drip emitters per container, by container type. The planner sets these defaults when you change a container’s “type” dropdown; you can override per-container.

Container Emitters Why
Lettuce / radish / herbs (small pot) 1 per pot Shallow roots, narrow pot, even surface watering
Tomatoes / cucumbers / peppers (5-gal pot) 2 per pot, opposite sides of the stem Heavy drinkers, deep root ball, want even saturation
Raised bed (~3-4’ wide) 1 emitter every ~12” along the row Linear bed; emitters on a single line cover the whole footprint

Override the count whenever your container shape disagrees with the default. A wide herb planter behaves more like a small bed than a small pot; a half-barrel tomato wants three emitters, not two.

Tubing length sanity check

When you place a container, the planner runs an auto-router (nearest-neighbor with Manhattan-routed segments) that draws the tubing for you in dashed lines. Most of the time it picks a sensible path. When it doesn’t — when the auto-routed line crosses a doorway, hops over the planter you’re standing behind, or runs across a gap your tubing physically can’t bridge — pick the tubing pen tool, draw the segment yourself, and the planner treats your manual line as the source of truth. Manual segments stay put when you move containers; auto-routed ones re-route. The total tubing length in the BOM updates live.

Auto-routing isn’t a contract. The planner doesn’t know what’s on your balcony — it only knows what’s on its grid. If a routed line crosses something it shouldn’t, draw the override and the BOM follows.

What the planner produces

When you commit the layout, three things drop out:

That’s the loop: draw the space, group into zones, let the planner count, hit the cart button. Every part you’ll order in the next page came out of the layout you just drew.

With your layout committed and your BOM in hand, the next page turns it into an Amazon cart.