Welcome to Plan a Garden with GardenCAD. This class is eight short lessons, and it follows the order you would actually work in: set the site, draw the ground, trace what is already there, choose what to grow, put plants in by hand, let the planter place the rest of the list, read the light, and finish with something you can print or share. Every tool in the editor turns up somewhere along that path, so by the end you will have met all of them in the situation each one is for. We start with the site, and that is deliberate. GardenCAD is not a drawing program that happens to know about plants. It is a solar model with a drawing program attached. Almost everything useful it tells you comes out of two numbers you set in the first minute of a new garden, and if those numbers are wrong then every shadow, every sun-hour count, and every warning about a plant being in the wrong place is wrong with them.

Three things by the end of this lesson. First, you will be able to set the garden's north, either by dragging the red needle on the compass in the corner of the canvas or by typing an exact bearing when you have one from a survey or a phone compass. Second, you will be able to set the garden's location, and say what latitude changes: the height the sun climbs to, the length and direction of every shadow, the frost dates that bracket your growing season, and the hardiness zone the plant library checks against. Third, you will be able to drive the sun bar under the canvas to any date and time you like, which is the control that turns a static drawing into something you can interrogate. Ten minutes, and none of it involves drawing anything yet.

Here is the idea the whole class rests on. A garden plan drawn without a location is a picture of some beds. The same plan with a latitude and a north bearing is a model you can ask questions of. Which end of this bed gets six hours of sun in April? Will the new shed put the tomatoes in shade by three in the afternoon? Is this corner ever warm enough for the thing I want to grow there? None of those questions have answers until the editor knows where on the planet you are standing and which way you are facing. The two numbers cost you about thirty seconds and they are the difference between a drawing and a plan. Set them first, before you draw anything, because everything you draw afterwards inherits them.

Four steps to a configured site. First, name the garden. The field sits in the top bar next to the logo, and the name is what you will look for later in the gardens list, so use the address or the bed's nickname rather than leaving it Untitled. Second, set north. The compass sits in the top-left corner of the canvas. Drag the red needle until it points the way north actually points from your plot. If you know the bearing exactly, open Settings and type it instead. Third, set the location. Settings holds the latitude and longitude, and you can seed a default there so every new garden starts near home. Fourth, check the sun bar under the canvas: pick a date in your growing season and a time of day, and watch the gold arc on the compass follow. If the shadows fall the way they do in real life, your site is set correctly.

The sun bar is the strip under the canvas, and it is the control that makes the garden move. It carries a date, a time, a jump to Now, a jump to solar noon, and three overlay toggles you will meet properly in Lesson 07. Think of the date and time as a pair of hands on the model. Drag the time and the shadows sweep across the plot the way they do over an afternoon. Change the date and the sun climbs higher or lower, because that is what the seasons are. A bed that bakes in July can sit in the shadow of a fence for the whole of March, and the only way to see that is to move the date and watch. The bar also carries a Days control, which widens the question from one moment to a window, and that is how the editor works out sun hours rather than sun position.

Before you go on, spend two minutes on your own site. You do not need the editor open for this. Picture the piece of ground you want to plan and try to answer three questions from memory. Which way does it face? Most people know roughly, and the ones who are certain are often wrong by ninety degrees, which is worth finding out now rather than after you have planted a bed. Where does shade come from? A fence, a neighbour's wall, a mature tree, the house itself. And when does the sun leave? Not the hour of sunset, but the hour the sun goes behind whatever is in the way, which is usually a good deal earlier and is the number that actually governs what will grow. Hold those three answers. You will check every one of them against the model in Lesson 07.

Three things to carry into the next lesson. The site comes first, because north and latitude are inherited by everything you draw afterwards and correcting them later is free while redrawing a garden is not. North is set by dragging the red needle on the compass in the corner of the canvas, or by typing an exact bearing in Settings when you have one. And the sun bar under the canvas is not decoration: the date and time you leave it at are the moment the whole plan is being drawn for, so when a shadow surprises you, check the date before you doubt the model. That is the site. In the next lesson we finally draw something, and every shape you make will already know where it is and which way it faces.