Garden Planning Tools

How do other approaches compare to GGC?

If you search for "garden planning tools" on the Internet, you'll find dozens of applications. Most of those are essentially "landscape architecture" tools for people who want to design the visual look of their (flower) gardens. This is an interesting design problem, but not the problem addressed by Geo Garden Club.

If you narrow the search to say, "vegetable garden planning tools", you'll still find many that focus on the visual look of the garden bed, but there are a few that focus on the kinds of issues of interest to GGC. Here are a few of the applications we have found that address at least some of the needs of our target demographic: "serious" gardeners.

Growing Interactive

Growing Interactive bills itself as "the leading software company for gardeners", and this is probably correct. They have released a family of 9 white label software applications including:

• Grow Veg,
• Territorial Seed Garden Planner,
• VegPlotter,
• The Old Farmer's Almanac Garden Planner,
• Mother Earth News Garden Planner,
• Mr. Fothergill's Seeds Garden Planner,
• Suttons Seeds Garden Planner,
• Seed Money Garden Planner, and
• Garden Plan Pro.

They also appear to have spun off an independent mobile application development company called Knowledge is Porridge.

All of these garden planners appear to implement the same user interface, and differ in the contents of the application's seed catalog. In other words, Growing Interactive enables seed companies to augment their marketing materials (such as a color brochure) with an online application that helps gardeners design their garden plot and then guide them to the seeds from a specific vendor. The apps are subscription-based, and users pay around $30-$40/year after a free trial period.

This video appears to provide a good overview of the features associated with this family of applications:

Here are some of the interesting capabilities of Growing Interactive:

• An interactive, online mechanism for specifying the "plot plan" with the layout of beds and the square footage associated with each bed. Based on the plot plan, the software can provide various capabilities, such as indicating the maximum number of plants of a given type that can be grown in a particular bed.

• The software asks you to specify the geographic location of your garden on a map. From that, the software attempts to determine the climate conditions associated with your garden and automatically predict frost dates and the appropriate dates for sowing, transplanting, or harvesting.

• Growing Interactive has produced a large YouTube library containing almost 500 videos and 750K subscribers.

On the other hand, Growing Interactive's software does not implement many of the GeoGardenClub design innovations: Chapters, Access Control, Observations, Outcomes, Seed Saving and Sharing. Perhaps most interestingly, Growing Interactive's business model (i.e. white label software for use by seed companies) would make it difficult for them to embrace our approach of allowing Chapters to build their own seed databases with a combination of vendors and gardener-supplied seeds.

In summary, Growing Interactive's software products will appeal to gardeners who benefit from a design tool for creating the plot plan. GGC will appeal to gardeners who benefit from our design innovations.

Planter

Planter appears to be quite similar to Growing Interactive. It costs only $12/year. Here is an intro video:

From the video, Planter seems like a somewhat more primitive version of Growing Interactive's software. You create a plot plan, drag and drop plants to it, and select from a pre-built list of plants and varieties. You can see all of their videos here.

Seed Time

SeedTime bills itself as "the Fastest Way to Plan Your Garden or Small Farm Ever. Visualize exactly when to seed, transplant, or harvest crops in your garden all year round - based on your local area." While it has a free tier with reduced functionality, it is the most expensive app we found, at $13/month or $109/year for all of its features. Here is their video library.

Here is an informative review by a user from Circle City Seeds, a seed saving organization.

Seedtime has a lot of useful features. Here are a few of the ways in which Seedtime and GeoGardenClub differ:

• The Seedtime app is implemented as a web application. To use it on your phone, you use the phone's browser to run the web app. Thus, it is designed as a "web-first" application. This generally means the user experience is optimized for a large screen, and sacrifices are made for mobile devices. In contrast, Geo Garden Club is designed as a "mobile-first" application, which optimizes the user experience for mobile devices, but results in user experience sacrifices in the web version.

• Seedtime's community building mechanism consists of a single, private Facebook Group combining users from all geographic regions. Geo Garden Club's community building mechanism involves separate communities (Chapters) for each geographic region. Within a Chapter, members of a Chapter can see details about each other's gardens, share Planting data, and allows others to become editors in order to co-manage gardens.

• Seedtime's home page states: "We've already pre-installed over 2,670+ veggie and herb varieties to get you up and running out the gate. We'll be rapidly updating and expanding this database to include even more crops, berries, flowers, and more." In contrast, Geo Garden Club intentionally avoids the use of a single global database of varieties for all gardeners. Instead, each Chapter grows its own database of varieties to reflect the plants that are actually grown in their geographic region. For example, the Whatcom Washington Chapter has so far defined 90 Crops and 300 varieties.

• Finally, from our experience signing up for the free trial, Seedtime is quite aggressive about marketing their affiliates to users. For example, we experienced frequent time-limited promotions (i.e. "Get $5 off when you buy seeds from this vendor, this week only!"). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it clear that affiliate marketing is an important revenue stream for them. In contrast, Geo Garden Club derives all of its revenue from subscriptions and remains independent from seed vendors and other garden suppliers.

Obsolete applications

There are some applications that are no longer available that can be instructive:

• Garden Manager was designed to "keep you on track, helping optimize your plan for maximum food production, notifying you when it's time to start transplants, thin, harvest and more. Weird weather on it's way, or haven't had enough rain for what you're growing? No worries, your Garden Manager lets you know and shows you what to do." However, their home page goes on to say that "The Garden Manager App came down to make room for raising friends and families up."

• Grow It! was the product of a collaboration between Ball Horticulture and Eight Bit Studios. They teamed up to "help the next generation of gardeners discover plants and learn about what grows in their region. What started out as a seed of an idea has bloomed into a community of over 1 million “Growers” who have submitted over 3 million photo ratings, while helping thousands of people identify plants and learn about what grows in their region."

Urban Agriculture Tools

"Urban Agriculture" is a general term for cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around urban areas. These tools are distinguished from home garden planner tools by a focus on more professional, market-oriented approach to small-scale farming. Here are some of the products with some basic information:

	Name/URL	Users	Cost
LF	LiteFarm, wiki, github	1000s	Free, Open Source
COG	COG-Pro	?	$79-$159/year
VT	VeggieTables	?	$89/year + $19/additional user
AS	AgSquared SimpleFarm	1000s	$10/user/month
FB	Farmbrite	1000s	$15-$30/month
T	Tend	?	$30-39/month
FS	FarmStatistics	?	$20/year
AD	Agritecture Designer	120	$30-80/month

Some general observations about urban agriculture tools:

• These tools all emphasize (and provide support for) commercial, for-profit farming (albeit on a small scale).
• Several focus on record-keeping required for organic certification.
• Several focus on people management.
• None have mechanisms to share data with neighboring farms.

Citizen Science technologies

Finally, we found a few tools that support citizen science as it relates to climate change:

	Name/URL	Users	Cost
NN	Nature's Notebook	1000s	Free
SF	SmartFin	?	Free

Our goal is for GGC to complement existing approaches to Citizen Science. We would like to work with these organizations to determine the best wa for GGC to collect data to augment current data sets and make them more valuable to researchers.