Drawing Your Garden Plan Video Lecture - Learn the art of Garden Planning

[Music]
The first step when planning your garden is to
spend a few minutes outside measuring it,
or deciding how large you want to it be.
This will be time well spent, because once the layout of your garden is accurately drawn in the Garden Planner
it can be used year after year.
Once you have the size, you can start using the Garden Planner to draw it out.
If you have a large growing area, you may wish to divide it into more than one plan,
so that you don't have to scroll around the screen so much.
There are 2 kinds of shapes you can
add to your plan: open shapes and solid shapes.
Open shapes
are ideal for drawing garden beds and structures.
For example, to add a raised bed you
click to pick up the Rectangle Tool,
move to where you want to draw it, and
then hold down the mouse to drag out the bed.
Once placed on the plan, shapes can be
resized using the corner handles,
rotated using the round handles, and
moved by dragging them.
Solid shapes are all one color, and can easily be added in the same way,
like this pond.
Like open shapes they can
be moved and resized easily.
There's also a Background Fill tool, but this works differently to solid shapes -
for example, if you created the pond
using an open circle
and then filled it using the fill tool, it works,
but then if you want to adjust
the size or position of the pond
the Fill is part of the background, not
the shape, so it doesn't move with it.
For this reason the background fill tool
should just be used for setting a surrounding color
when your plan is almost
complete, or for non-standard shapes.
You may also wish to avoid large colored
areas if you don't want to use a lot of ink when printing.
You can select shapes by clicking them,
and holding down the Shift key allows you
to select more than one shape
so they can be moved as a group.
All shapes, text and plants can be copied and pasted
to new locations,
so it is easy to duplicate vegetable
beds.
Selected shapes can be deleted using
this Delete button or the Delete key,
and don't forget to save your plan when
it's done.
More complex shapes can be created
out of lines, like this one,
and dragging the middle handle creates
curves.
If you want the lines to meet exactly,
you may wish to select the Snap to Grid option,
which you can find by clicking
the Settings button.
There are also options to clear the
background, or to delete a whole plan.
Text can be added by first setting the size
and color,
then picking up the Text tool, dragging out a text box, and clicking inside to type.
Once finished just click outside the
text box.
Don't forget that in subsequent years,
the software can simply copy the whole garden layout to a new plan, removing the plants.
So with a full set of
drawing tools, the Garden Planner makes it easy
to create your perfect garden layout,
and reuse it year after year.