Computer Gardening - NOT Farmville!

In chatting with some friends on Facebook about seed planting times, especially in reference to the act of remembering to plant said seeds, I recalled something as well. I wrote a blog post awhile ago with a link to an excellent online seed starting chart. In that same post, I talked about other online gardening resources. Since that was a whopping two years ago and a million things have changed since then computer-wise, a good old blog post rewrite is in order.

Seed Starting/Planting Charts: I used Organic Gardening Magazine's seed starting chart for years until I found this online version that calculates the math for me. Check out the "lazy gardener's seed starting chart" at You Grow Girl. All you have to do is download it, and enter the recommended planting date for your time zone. It consists of a list of common garden veggies, how long they take to grow from seed, and how many weeks before or after your last frost date that they should be planted. It also specifies whether the plant should be seeded directly into the ground, or started indoors under lights.

Another option is at "The Vegetable Garden". This site also does the thinking for you by allowing you to enter your zip code to get your USDA planting zone. After that, you can use their zone specific planting guide to determine when to get established plants into the ground. This guide will NOT help you start your own seeds, and you need to intuitively know if they are referring to planting direct by seed, or planting established plants. This one also gives a broader range for planting dates, whereas the You Grow Girl chart is more precise. Either way, it's better than guessing!

Online Garden Planners: Two years ago, I was claiming to "still love my pencil/graph paper/college rule notebook." Bah! Never again. This will be my third garden season using the Mother Earth News  online vegetable garden planner.  It rocks, and I'm hooked. I made a map of my garden, drew in the established raised planting beds and fixed paths, and perennial vegetables. Every season, I keep that layout and move around my annual vegetables in a new saved plan. In this way, I can manage successive sowing and crop rotation. The planner has extra features as well, including planting charts and email reminders.

You can try the service out for yourself for 30 days to see if it would be useful for your garden, and the demo videos show you exactly how to input your garden bed layout. After that, it's a subscription service of $24 per year. For a small garden, this planner is overkill. Also, the planner only includes vegetables, herbs and fruit crops. If your garden is mostly flowers and landscape plantings, the database is inadequate.  

Gardening Apps: I hung around on Google Play and tried out a few smartphone based garden planners and didn't like them much. Other planners had terrible reviews and I didn't even try them. I think I am personally not inclined to involve my phone in gardening, which is wise on my part. I garden like the Muppet Show's Swedish chef cooks. Things get thrown, tools get damaged, and I wind up speaking in foreign gibberish. My phone had best stay out of the fray.

However, if you garden more like Martha Stewart, in your pressed khakis and perfectly clean SPF 50 lightweight gardening shirt, you might successfully garden and update your phone at the same time. To that end, I am filching some app reviews from a recent article from one of my favorite publications, The Herb Quarterly.

Map it - "Garden Tracker" (Apple) - $1.99. This might be a good (and cheap) option for small gardens. The app allows you to lay out a rectangular garden up to 2500 square feet and fill it with 65 veggies and herbs. It includes info about planting, garden pests, and lunar phases. If you use this and like it, let me know.

When do I plant? - "Gardenate" (Android) - $1.99. Enter your zone, and get info on what you can plant each month.

For city folk - "Urban Gardening" (Android) - free. Get news from various blogs about container gardening on balconies.

Herbs for beginners - "Herbs+" (Apple) - $2.99. Gardening and cooking tips for 40 common herbs.

Name that plant - "Botany Buddy" (Apple) - $9.99 and "Landscaper's Companion" (Apple and Android) - $4.99. Botany Buddy has in depth coverage of about 2000 plants, while Landscaper's Companion catalogs 25,000 plants in 17 categories.

Name that tree - "Leafsnap" (Apple, Android in development) - free. This one uses visual-recognition software to identify a tree by a picture of the leaf. How freaking cool is that?? I can't wait for the Android version. Currently it only covers trees native to the northeast, but they're working on covering the whole U.S.

Name that shroom - "Wild Mushrooms of North America and Europe by Roger Phillips" (Apple) - $1.99 and "Roger Phillips Mushrooms" (Android) - $3.99. Go mushroom hunting with this app, which covers 1500 varieties of edible, poisonous and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Have fun, and bring snacks!

Name that critter - Apps from the National Audubon Society (Apple and Android) - $4.99. Decide between birds, butterflies, insects, spiders and other garden friends.

Name that wild food - "Wild Edibles" (Apple), $7.99. Naturalist and funnyman Steve Brill made this app. We followed him around on a local tour presented by our county park system, and when it was through, considered ourselves fully informed about the food value of our local "weeds." If Steve isn't coming to your town, you can get the app instead.

At this point in an ideal world, I would insert an image of my growing seedlings or some screenshots of my online garden planner. But I have yet to document this year's gardening attempts, and my garden plan is too big to upload to the web. In the meantime, here's a nice picture Tom took last summer of The Buddha, a grasshopper and a bunch of zinnias. Happy spring!