Grow Your Own Magazine

As a keen ornamental gardener, this is my first year with veggies.

I've been very greedy and now have a huge box full seed packets.

I've knocked up a little database to help me keep track of seed requirements and the plantings I've made. (I'm a freelance software developer when it's raining!)

Does anyone else use a PC to help with their gardening activities ?

Does anyone use a comercial product ?
If so what are it's strengths and weeknesses ?

What sort of features would a piece of software aimed at the veg grower need to be of use to you ?

[quote=Maf;188763]Does anyone else use a PC to help with their gardening activities ?

Does anyone use a comercial product ?
If so what are it's strengths and weeknesses ?
QUOTE]

Yes I use a PC to help with my gardening.

I use the grapevine to answer all my silly queries.

It fullfils all my requirements and the only problem is I spend too much time reading the vine and don't get the housework done

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Happy Gardening,
Shirley

http://www.honeyjukes.co.uk

snap!

i use excel as well - makes a nice grid for my planting plan and can colour blocks in quite easily, and change the colours as required
also list all my seeds and sowing / planting info on another sheet

dont know of any veggie plot software or whether it would be useful to me ....

You're not alone, I get carried away when I outta sort out the household tasks.

I might be wrong but I don't think there is anything like a Vegetable Gardening software although would be very useful to have one where you can enter the number and size of your veggie beds, answer a few preprogrammed questions to help the program generate the best growing plan that takes into account of veg spacing, companion planting, crop rotation, catching crop, cut and come again crop, successional sowing, winter crop etc....so that I don't have to. In the meantime, I'll just have to stick with spreadsheet & word document.

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Food for Free

I'm using growveg.com which is an online plot planner. It's not perfect, but it does have some cunning features - like it lets you use the same plan a year later but warns you if you're planting a crop in the same place two years running.

EDT: I should add you have to pay for a subscription. Got mine free 'cos I reviewed it for a gardening mag!

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Resistance is fertile

i wanted to make my own lunar sowing and planting in a slightly more indepth way to what iv seen so far but anything to do with making data bases gives me a headache, i only have to say the word excel and i feel one coming. Maf i would love to see what you have done though and if you want anyone to try a beta version i will gladly give it a go.
good luck with it

Hi
I love making tables in exel (sad, I know) and over the last three years have experimented with various formats. The problem was trying to keep information together - seed packets would be at home, plants on allotment - when to plant out - can't remember. And I needed something to remind me for successional sowing. And those A-Z folders haven't worked for me, got in a muddle and lost the thread a bit.

This year I think I've cracked it. Put all the seeds I bought on a spreadsheet noting all seed packet info, who I bought it from and next to this a jan-Dec series of columns so I could list when to sow and when to harvest.

The lovely thing about exel is being able to sort and this means I can get the table sorted by variety, supplier (for reordering) and most importantly by sowing date. (Perhaps even most importantly you can keep a running £££ when working out what to buy, you can keep typing away, have an Oh my God moment when you look at the bottom and start deleting till the price becomes manageable again). When I had worked it all out, I could sort by supplier, cut the table into one bit for each and send this off to them attached to the order, saves writing it all over again.

After two years of getting it half right, I think I've cracked it now - and it also means I can print out the whole thing and keep it in the greenhouse.
As I start growing/harvesting I shall add notes to help for next year.
Sue

i have a mac, so I use good old squared paper to plan, and comic life to draw the plot, and just mark it as I go. I'll end up with one drawing per season; so just writing in [for example] old PSB out 1st march, shallots in 1st March, first crop xth of June, interspaced with lettuce from xth of June to xth of july, last shallot out xth sept, etc etc

I mark out all my beds into smaller sections so I can monitor what goes where.

Will do the same with the lottie: love excel but comic life is such fun!!!

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Andrea :wavehello

http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/gra...logs/zazen999/

moon trials completed:
tomatoes
[46% increase in crop per seed sown and 10% increase in crop per plant]

currently underway:
calabrese
garlic

I use a sheet of A4 with the garden plan on 3 times with what goes where in rotation. The year is written on in pencil, so at the end of the season, I rub out the last digit and add 3. It costs 0.012p/sheet and 12p for the pencil. As for when to sow and plant, I use an old diary. I've had the same one 11 years and I was given that.

I agree, Excel is one of the most useful commercial programmes I've found. As Sue says you can sort the data and so use it as a mini database. I also started keeping temperature records 3 years ago, and as well as the figures Excel lets you create lovely colourful graphs. Sad, aren't I?

Which mag is your review in Paul ? Whould like to know your thoughts, as I prepare for Gardening Software Dominion

We don't use software to help us, but like most others we use the internet to make a record of what we do and when, so we can look back over it the following year and hopefully learn by our mistakes.

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Read our chicken keeping and veg growing diary here:
http://www.naturalaromas.co.uk/the_good_life
Veg section: Last updated on October 8 2008
Chicken section: Last updated on April 22 2008

The only software I use are my fur lined boots!

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My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

I use the PC for keeping records - my attempts at Excel records never really got off the ground, due to my not quite working out how best to set it up or what I wanted to record... anyway I'm more of a natterer than a data-processor, so where I got to was to just jot down brief notes in a notebook on what I've done or how things are growing or whatever, and also keep an online journal with lots of witter and some lovely pics of the garden and our little allotment (it is here in case anyone's interested lol Hatching Vegetables)

As far as planning goes, most of that happens in my head and then I scribble a rough drawing down in my notebook with labels like "BRASSICAS HERE" and "PROBABLY ASPARAGUS" plus a list of which veg I fancied having a go at... Maybe once I've had a couple of years of mucking about, experimenting and seeing what works, then I will start planning things a bit more carefully and find software useful for this, but I'm still at enthusiastic beginner stage now!

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Warning: I have a dangerous tendency to act like I know what I'm talking about.

I have also ended up with lots of seed packets, so I'm using an Excel database, with the front page listing all seeds, variaties and expiry dates, with the hyperlinks to separate sheet, so If you click on "Early Nantes", if opens up a sheets that states sowing dates, germination, etc for this variety. It's very useful and not complicated at all, so probably would not bother with proper software if there was any

The problem I have with plans and software is the human interface - ie, me. I'm not a particularly well organised mind, and that translates onto paper/pc/chalkboard or any other medium used to "plan". I then get myself in a muddy fuddle and give up planning.

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A simple dude trying to grow veg.

http://haywayne.blogspot.com/ - Minor update - 10th November

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