Square foot gardening grid
Half-inch squares with a heavier line every four, for planning raised beds one square foot at a time.
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One square, one square foot
The square foot method divides a raised bed into one-foot cells and plants each cell as a unit — one tomato, four lettuces, nine spinach, sixteen radishes, according to the plant's spacing requirement. Treat each small square here as a foot and a standard 4 × 8 bed occupies eight by sixteen squares in one corner of the sheet, leaving room to plan two more beds beside it.
Draw the bed, then draw the season
Planning on paper before ordering seed catches the two mistakes almost everyone makes: putting the tall crops on the sunny side, where they shade everything behind them, and planting something that occupies its cell all season next to something you intended to succession-sow. Sketch the same bed three times — spring, midsummer, autumn — on one sheet and both problems become visible immediately.
Note the orientation and the sun
Mark north on the plan, and mark what shades the bed and when: a fence, a wall, next door's tree once it is in leaf. A bed that gets six hours of sun in June may get three in September. The drawing is the only place that information survives from one year to the next, and written on the plan it is still there when you sit down the following spring.
Printing it accurately
This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100% — not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.