Part of being a happy and balanced mom is making time for your interests and passions. For me, that passion is gardening and creating a natural space in which my daughter can learn and play. It’s so much fun to watch her stick her nose into a bloom or yell, “Water irises!!” at the top of her lungs when I haul out the hose. Primarily, I take care of a decent sized organic vegetable garden and look after a bunch of berry bushes. However, I have recently started to brainstorm about what types of flowers I could incorporate into my border gardens.
One of our summer projects is to install a backyard fence. Putting in a fence means that we can delineate our back yard space more and I can have some more defined garden beds for flowers. I have a
How My Garden Grows Pinterest board where I pin things I have or would to have in my yard. I try to not when certain flowers bloom, how tall they get and other information in the text box. I also try to think about when my vegetables will have blooms and time everything to have multiple colors and textures appearing through spring and summer. In my desire to get all of this planning together, I started to explore what gardening apps are available for the iPhone. Below are my picks for which ones are worthwhile and interesting and which ones are able to be skipped.
THE WINNERS:
Available for both the iPhone ($1.99)and iPad ($3.99), this app is far and away the most comprehensive and user-friendly one out there. It allows you to keep track of up to twelve gardens. You can select which plants (herbs, flowers or veggies) to put in each garden from their database or add your own plants if they do not have them listed. For each plant that you include, you can add the date when it was planted and in what form (seed or plant) you planted it. The app will tell you when veggies are ready for harvest, how much sun and water each plant needs, hardiness zones, common colors for blooms, for which function each flower is perfect (arranging, fragrance, etc.) and more!! It has a great reference section for what is happening in gardens this month, what you can plant now in your zone, a comprehensive gardening glossary and plant ideas. It’s a great mobile gardening encyclopedia and is the one that I will be using the most. The only downfall is that you cannot layout your garden, but I’ve got some others for you to use to fill that hole.
Garden Tracker ($.99 for the iPhone) picks up where Gardening Toolkit left off. It has a mapping feature, you can enter when you watered, fertilized, or treated the plants in your map, and it will tell you when to harvest them. This is primarily my mapper for veggies, but some flowers can be added, such as marigolds or pansies. It has a great resource in its pest section, which is perfect for when you are staring at a bug on your veggies or flowers and thinking about what the heck it is.
Eden Garden Designer
Eden Garden Designer ($1.99 for the iPhone) is a nice app for laying out your potential flower gardens. You can use their backgrounds, or take a picture of your space and upload it as your own background. Plants can be moved around to where you want them, it has information on how tall they are and when they bloom. So, if you are like me and dream of constant blooming in your yard, this is a great place to start. It’s a cute mapping app with a great premise, but it does miss the mark in its database. The database is very small and not all varieties of the plants that they do carry are included. Hopefully, this app will keep updating itself to allow gardeners to have more information at their hands.
If you have read my
magazine reviews, it is no mystery that I am an avid devotee to all things Mother Earth News produces. This great little app (FREE for the iPhone) includes all of the great articles about individual plants that you normally find in the magazine’s archives. This is primarily for vegetables and other foods, but if you want to think about which veggies produce great blooms and flowers before they are harvested, this is a good spot to start. Mother Earth News has really started to hop on to what technology can bring to the home gardener or homesteader. We are recent iPad buyers. So, I am super psyched to check out their new
Grow Planner App for the iPad ($9.99). It may take what Garden Tracker has given me to a whole new level. Stay tuned for another post on what I hope that can be!
NEEDS IMPROVEMENT:
Pocket Garden
For now, Pocket Garden is worth skipping, and as of this post is no longer available in the app store, so that should be easy to do. It feels like it was rushed out and had very little information. What few varieties of plants they did have listed were paltry and mostly hybrids, which gave this heirloom gardener no interest. I am not sure why it has disappeared from the app store, but here is hoping that they took it back to the drawing board to make it better for a new release.
Herb Garden
This one was brought to you by the folks who had the Pocket Garden app, and it too has disappeared from the iTunes app store. It was a tad better than the one mentioned above, but fell short compared to the others above. The one great perk of it was that it had recipes linked to the herbs. What a great way to figure out what to do with all of that rosemary or dill! Too bad we have lost that feature, but perhaps it will inspire other apps to think further.
Overall, there are some great apps out there for planning your flower or kitchen gardens. I will be curious to see how comprehensive the
Mother Earth Grow Planner Garderning app is for the iPad and if it can bring everything together. They have a great archive database for recipes, so maybe even that could be added. It’s been a great opportunity to blog about these apps as part of the DailyBuzz Moms 9×9 Flowers Challenge! If any of you have tried out any other apps, please feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear more about folks’ experiences. Happy Gardening!
I’m linking up this week with:
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting review of some gardening apps. I’ll be checking some of them out.
Thanks for these reviews!! I’m off to check them out. Also, I have been attempting to use Evernote to take pics of my garden and keep things noted. I think that in combination with the first app would probably be good for me.
Very interesting informtion. I have way too many apps on my iPhone, but I had never thought of looking for gardening apps. Maybe I’ll clean off some the apps I don’t use and add a couple you reviewed. Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.
Love the reviews! I’m saving this for when I get my iPhone this summer. There’s probably something similar for the Droid, but…I keep running out of room on my phone.
There’s a garden app out there??? Cool! I might have to look into this!
Great reviews! I’ll have to see if any of these are available for Droid.
wow thanks for reviewing those apps! ive been looking at them!
debbie
Thanks for the reviews. I currently use Essential Garden Guide to help me learn about planting and caring for veggies. I’ll try out some of the others.
This was quite helpful- thanks for taking the time to write it all out!
You really make it appear really easy with your presentation
but I to find this topic to be really something that I feel I
might never understand. It sort of feels too complicated and extremely extensive for me.
I’m taking a look forward for your next put up, I will attempt to get the cling of it!
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