Plate to Plot: plan your garden from what you cook
Pick the dishes you cook and how often. Get crop amounts, plant counts, bed space, planting dates for your zone, and a seed list. 36 garden dishes, yields from extension tables.
How it works
- Set your household size.
- Pick the dishes you cook and how often: weekly in season, every 2 weeks, monthly, or a number of preserving batches.
- Plate to Plot adds up the garden ingredients, divides by typical yield per plant (for example about 8 lb of tomatoes per plant, varies), and converts plants to bed space.
- You get planting dates for your zone, a Seeds Now link for each crop, and a plan you can copy, print, or add to My Garden.
Your plan is saved in this browser.
Dishes
- Fresh salsa (pico de gallo): Chopped tomato, onion, jalapeno, and cilantro. The reason most people plant tomatoes.
- Canned tomato salsa: A pantry batch of salsa from paste tomatoes, peppers, and onions.
- Canned tomato sauce: Plain sauce from paste tomatoes. Season it with onion, garlic, and basil when you open a jar.
- Weeknight marinara: Fresh tomato sauce with onion, garlic, and basil for one pasta dinner.
- Basil pesto: Freezes well in ice cube trays, so a summer of basil lasts into winter.
- Caprese salad: Sliced tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil.
- Garden salad: Lettuce, cucumber, cherry tomatoes, and carrot.
- Greek salad: Cucumber, tomato, pepper, and red onion with feta.
- Garden vegetable stir fry: Broccoli, snap peas, pepper, and bok choy over rice.
- Ratatouille: Eggplant, zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes stewed together.
- Dill pickles: Fresh pack dill spears from pickling cucumbers.
- Bread and butter pickles: Sweet sliced pickles with onions.
- Refrigerator pickles: No canning. One jar in the fridge, ready in a day.
- Pickled jalapenos: Sliced jalapenos in vinegar for tacos and nachos all year.
- Pickled beets: Sweet and sour beets with onions.
- Roasted root vegetables: Carrots, beets, parsnips, potatoes, and onion. Stored roots carry this into winter.
- Potato salad: Potatoes, onion, celery, and dill.
- Coleslaw: Shredded cabbage and carrot.
- Sauerkraut: Fermented cabbage. Just cabbage and salt.
- Sauteed garlic greens: Kale and chard with garlic. Greens shrink a lot, so you need more than you think.
- Garlic green beans: Fresh bush beans with garlic.
- Dilly beans: Pickled green beans with dill and garlic.
- Zucchini bread: The answer to too much zucchini. Grated zucchini also freezes for winter baking.
- Stuffed peppers: Bell peppers filled with rice, tomato, and onion.
- Butternut squash soup: Cured butternut keeps 2 to 3 months, so this runs from fall into winter.
- Pumpkin pie from scratch: One pie pumpkin makes about enough puree for one pie.
- Gazpacho: Cold blended tomato and cucumber soup for the hottest weeks.
- Chimichurri: Parsley, oregano, and garlic sauce for grilled food.
- Tabbouleh: A parsley salad, not a grain salad. It takes a lot of parsley.
- Garden vegetable soup: Tomato, carrot, celery, beans, zucchini, and potato. Freezes well.
- Strawberry jam: June bearing plants give one big picking window, which suits jam.
- Roasted sweet potatoes: Cured sweet potatoes keep for months at room temperature.
- Summer corn salad: Fresh corn off the cob with tomatoes, onion, and basil.
- Spring spinach salad: Spinach with strawberries and red onion, a spring pairing.
- Roasted okra: Roasting keeps okra crisp, not slimy.
- Eggplant parmesan: Breaded eggplant layered with garden tomato sauce.
Sources and assumptions
Amounts include 15 percent extra for culls, pests, and kitchen trim. Plant counts use the typical yield; the range uses the high and low yields. Bed space assumes intensive beds at recommended spacing. Yields vary with variety, weather, and soil.
- Kansas State University Research and Extension, MF315 Vegetable Garden Planting Guide (average crop per 10 feet of row)
- University of Maine Cooperative Extension, Planting Chart for the Home Vegetable Garden
- Clemson HGIC, How Much to Grow: Planning for Year-Round Garden Productivity
- ThriveThyme estimate from typical harvests (no single extension table lists this crop per plant)
- National Center for Home Food Preservation (USDA tested canning and pickling recipes)
Guides and tools
Some outbound seed-house links may be affiliate links.