I love sitting in my garden watching butterflies, bees and dragonflies swirl and dive, discovering toads, preying mantis and shy lady bugs hiding in the shade. I love eating fat, juicy, just harvested tomatoes, roasted okra and eggplant, fresh green beans steamed and lightly salted, crisp chard and spinach sautéed in olive oil with a sprinkle of feta. But despite all this garden big love, I’m also a pretty lazy gardener and always looking for new ways to make this earthy obsession of mine less time consuming.
Yesterday a tool from Mother Earth News showed up in my email inbox that may help further this quest for lazy gardening nirvana. It’s an online Vegetable Garden Planner – granted not a very sexy name -- and using only the word “vegetable” in the title is kind of misleading because fruits are included in this little gizmo (Mother Earth might wanna address that in the future). But other than that all the standard fruit and vegetable garden plants are here, and then some, and if you wanna get even more diverse, you can add plants and varieties and include info on when to plant, spacing and so on. For an info, data and organization hound – and I am one -- I found this feature not only fun, but educational and even inspiring – I learned a few things about plants I’ve never tried growing before and now will consider adding to my garden (if I can find room). And how nice to have all this info all in one place ready to be accessed over and over again.
The tool also provides help with garden design, plant placement, planting times, crop rotations. And you can try it free for 30 days. After that it’s an annual subscription of $25 a year or $40 for two years.
One of the most useful features allows you to save your plan for each season with notes, so you have an archive of what you’ve planted where and when. If you prefer a paper record, there’s an option to print. And then when you begin the next season, it uses information from your previous season’s plan to help with rotation information. Now that’s quite cool. Up until now I’ve been doing this on graph paper with lots of messy notes, which is fine too, this just gets it all into a digital format. Pros and cons to that too. Like Captain Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” I have an affinity for real paper and real books and am not so sure digitizing every last aspect of our life is a good idea. I would hate to store up years of garden plans and then lose them when the servers fry. Then again it may be more likely that my paper plans will get lost or torn or thrown away. Like I said, pros and cons.
The planner also helps out with a plant list mode (see image below) and by sending reminders about when to plant, frost dates and so on and with my way too busy life I can use that, but I also found that in design mode the program can be a little buggy at times.
So I’m in wait-and-see mode for now. Maybe this little tool will grow on me.
