I’m not quite sure how well Mary Mary Quite Contrary’s silver bells and cockle shells grew, but I am sure I need all the help I can get in order to develop a greener thumb.
I’ve been scouring the Internet the past month searching for iOS apps to help my garden grow this spring. Here are a few resources that just might help get the job done.
iGarden USA takes into account your climate zone and recommends planting dates for the most popular vegetables. Once garden seeds are planted, you can use the app to track your garden's progress with estimated harvest dates. A few more highlights:
- Provides planting details for each type of vegetable such as planting depth, row spacing, and seed spacing
- Ability to add to your garden as a plant or as a seed
- Comes with a climate zone map
- Wiki feature provides detailed plant information
- Weather feature shows local weather forecast
- Ability to add your own customizable plants
- Recommended pH soil levels for each plant
- Shows common insects and recommended pesticides for each plant
- Ability to add notes with photos from the camera or photo album
This is an exhaustive reference app to help plan and manage your garden. It contains over 7,000 species of flowers, herbs, and vegetables with icons that indicate when the plant blooms and what type of water and light conditions it prefers. Other features:
- A complete journal to enter images and notes of garden
- Ability to sort plants by title, type or bloom time, next irrigation or location
- A complete to-do helping you track tasks and care of plants
- Complete reference guide of pest and diseases
- Ability to print info about plants, species, and the to-do list directly from the app
- Highly searchable database
3. Garden Tracker --- iOS, $1.99
Garden Tracker lets you size and plan garden plots, plant vegetables, and then track your garden’s progress, including days to harvest, days since watered, and days since last fertilized. All this info is referenced in a grid you design.
- Choose the number of rows and columns in as many gardens as you want
- Fill grid by choosing from 50+ common vegetable/herbs and general planting information including spacing, water needs, ideal soil temperature, recommended planting season, and recommended planting depth
- Sunset/Sunrise calculator by your location and day
- Lunar calendar for lunar cycle gardeners
- Garden Zone map with first and last frost dates for your USDA planting zone
- Visual pest database with common pests and a focus on organic solutions to help tackle intruders in the field
It seems every summer I spy a beautiful flower in a neighbor’s garden and make a mental note to plant the same in my garden the following spring. Spring rolls around and guess what happens? I forget about the flower until I see it blooming again in the neighbor’s yard. Enter “Gardens” the free iOS app. Gardens allows you to take pictures of plants, caption them, and either save them in your personal scrapbook on the app or distribute through email or social media. The app contains ‘How To’ videos introduced by experts with pictures and information about specific garden tasks. There are also shopping links within the parcels so you can tap-to-buy plants and products.
Garden Bugs is a reference guide containing the most common garden pests. The application will help you to identify the pest and then suggest ways to treat and eradicate it from your garden, including the ability to buy pest control from within the app at the most competitive prices.
Read more of our Tech Talk columns.
Copyright 2013 Lisa Schmidt
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