Does anybody have a recommendation for a gardening app?
I’m always heading to the nursery this time of year to get a few plants. I’d love an app that would make it easy for me to track things like the particular variety of lavender I planted, or the breed of tomatoes that worked really well, or even the information on those tiny plastic cards about when this particular type of blueberry is supposed to ripen or when to cut back this flowering shrub.
In short, I want something as well thought out as Paprika, but for gardening.
(And yes, I’m sure I could roll my own with Notes or some other more generic database app. But I don’t want to do that if there’s a better option out there.)
I love the Paprika concept. I use spreadsheets especially for veggies. But what I end up using most effectively are scale drawings of my garden plans. I make notes on these sheets … for ornamentals I can track several years of changes on one sheet. For veggies … into square-foot method …I make a packet of sheets for each bed. Works well enough for planing next year as well as tracking succession plantings for the same year.
I have tried various garden planners but always end up with a pencil/markers and large sheets of paper.
I don’t know of any apps (macOS or iPadOS or iOS) but nothing beats the satisfaction of an old-school gardener’s journal in a paper notebook, with hand drawn plans, pasted in images and clips from seed catalogs, notations, weather updates, etc. Some things are best left analog
A few years ago I bought my mom Garden Plan Pro for iOS. Never checked to see how she liked it, or even if she ever used it. Just looked now and I see that the price has since doubled, and recent reviews aren’t good.
I use a journal in DayOne to record the jobs I’ve done each day and any varieties I’ve planted. I take a photograph of the seed packet for any seeds I plant, or the label of any plants I have bought.
It’s also useful to keep photographs at various times of the year to see which beds lack colour or will need rearranging when it’s possible to move larger plants. So I guess, it’s just a development of the original gardener’s journal.
I’d also be interested in an app, as I love Paprika, but I think it’s a more complex problem than recipe management.
After playing around with some of the contenders on the app store, I’ve decided to go with Apple Notes because:
scanning plant info from tags/etc. is very simple
adding sketches, photos, etc. is also simple
adding links to web pages about the plant (including pruning techniques, etc.) is easy
easy to share with family
relatively future-proof
alternative apps were lacking in some basic way
The apps I found in the app store that were the most promising (Right Plants, Gardenia) were somewhat limited in what information they included, involved some sort of social (i.e. tracking) aspect, and were both too limited and too complex for my needs.
Many of these apps seemed limited by their efforts to build-in information about a huge number of plants. I think the better strategy for anybody looking to build an app going forward is to make a tool to ingest plant information from the web—much as Paprika allows for recipes. (Yes, parsing plant information may be more difficult than parsing a recipe, but I bet it’s still possible.)
Wasn’t sure if you found anything better. I use AirTable to track my plants - mostly where I planted something; what’s current, etc. Not much actual info on the plants like sizes, light needs, etc. Thanks for the follow-up. I hope you have a better growing season in 2023.
