Having a hard time designing your veggie garden this spring? Not sure when to plant or when to harvest? Read on…your going to love this cool tool from one of our affiliates GrowVeg.com.
GrowVeg.com is an excellent site developed in 2005 by Jeremy Dore. One of the best features of his site is the interactive Garden Planning Tool which makes it simple to plan and space out crops so they will grow well.
Jeremy, along with his wife Jayne and an incredible team of expert garden writes, have made GrowVeg.com a very exciting website.
Before starting GrowVeg.com, Jeremy was a computer programmer before he was an organic gardener. Once those two loves where joined together, The Garden Planner was born. It’s like a match made in heaven.
Below are 9 reasons we love GrowVeg.com and why you should try using this cool online too for planning your vegetable garden this spring.
9 Reasons to try GrowVeg.com Garden Planner This Spring
- With this online gardening tool, all you have to do is click on the vegetable, herb or flower you want to grow and drag it into your virtual vegetable plot (with dimensions you set) and it gives you the spacing and how many of that plant you may grow in your given space.
- The system even adapts to your own growing zone using their database of over 5000 weather stations. Print your own personalized planting chart showing how many of each plant you require and when to sow, plant and harvest them.
- This online garden planner may be used with traditional row planting, containers, raised beds or Square Foot Gardening.
- The program offers over 700 in-depth how-to grow guides on edible gardening with new articles every week.
- Tons of videos to help you along the way with practical, easy to follow directions that you may watch on any device. Very handy when you’re out in the garden!
- With the The Yearbook, or garden journal, keeping track of your progress fast and easy. Simply take photos outside of your garden, then upload along with written notes right from your mobile or tablet device. Record when you planted or last watered, diagnose problems and see how much you’ve harvested.
- It even remembers for you what you plant from year to year, sends you email reminders (optional) about what to sow and when to harvest and it even helps with crop rotation the following year.
- A great resource on how to get kids interested in gardening.
- You may sign up for a one month free trial and cancel at any time!
We love this online garden planning tool. Don’t go through another growing season struggling to plot out your garden, trying to figure out when and how to harvest, and not keeping a journal for next year!
Interview with Jermey Dore: Inventor of GrowVeg.com
Below is an interview I conducted with Jeremy recently that may help answer some of your questions.
Question: As a garden planning specialist, and the developer of GrowVeg.com, can you tell us a little about what inspired you to start this series of online guides that takes the guesswork out growing fruits, vegetables and herbs in our garden?
Answer: I started growing fruit and vegetables around 10 years ago and discovered how great fresh produce from the garden tastes.
My wife and I soon realized that there were lots of people like us who wanted to grow their own healthy organic food but who didn’t have the knowledge to do so – it just wasn’t passed down from the previous generation of gardeners.
As I learned more about how crops needed to be spaced and rotated to prevent the build up of pests and disease it became apparent that this was an area where great internet tools and advice could really help, so in 2005 I started planning a new website that would be simple to use, fun and informative.
We founded a company to turn the dream into reality and, with the help of many other people, www.GrowVeg.com was launched in late 2007. Since then it has rapidly grown in popularity and is used by gardeners all around the world.
Question Tell us more about the free online GrowGuides
Answer: We found that there were certain topics that pretty much all gardeners growing vegetables wanted to know about – things like how to start a vegetable plot from scratch, keeping tender plants protected from frost and how to rotate crops.
So, we worked closely with a number of great garden writers to produce concise GrowGuides with all the information you need to get started, plus links to other relevant articles. They have been very popular and are often used by new visitors to the website.
There are also individual Plant GrowGuides for each type of vegetable, fruit and herb. Gardeners can add their own growing tips and advice at the bottom so that good ideas get shared and they become even more valuable over time.
Question: Is there information about pest control on your website?
Answer: Pest control is something that usually becomes an issue when it’s too late to do much about it because the pests are already eating your crops!
So, on our website we have lots of useful information about preventing outbreaks of pests by using nature’s own balances.
Things like growing flowers that attract beneficial insects to keep down the number of aphids, or mixing plants and companion planting so you don’t get an invasion of pests.
There are GrowGuides on each of these topics and it’s something we regularly cover in our GrowBlog as well. The GrowBlog article on dealing with slugs is one of the most discussed yet!
Question: What about gardening ideas for the whole family? Do you supply any ideas to get our kids more interested in gardening?
Answer: Many people get into growing their own food because it’s a great activity for the whole family and one of the best ways of encouraging healthy eating in children.
So we have several GrowBlog articles and a GrowGuide all about how to make gardening fun for children. Most of the people who write for www.GrowVeg.com have children of their own, so there’s a lot of shared advice about what works well for each age group – everything from helping toddlers find ‘homes’ for worms through to trying to grow the biggest pumpkin with teenagers.
Question: I love the unique interactive “Garden Planning Tool” you have on your site which allows me to plug in the veggies I want to grow and then shows what type of spacing is needed for each. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Answer: The Garden Planning Tool is at the heart of our website because it makes it simple to plan and space out crops so they will grow well.
Instead of having to look up growing information, spacing and plant families it is all presented visually in the online tool.
It remembers what you planted from year to year, so it can give advice on where not to plant things in order to rotate crops. Plus, it’s simple to rework your plans in a way that is just messy and complicated with pen and paper.
A particularly helpful feature is that the system will look up your local climate using your zip code from a database of over 5000 weather stations and adjust the recommended sowing and planting times for every plant.
It then sends out reminder emails twice a month listing exactly what you need to sow and plant out in the following two weeks, personalized to your plans and area.
Since it launched two years ago we have been working with gardeners around the world to add useful features and we have a major new version coming out later in Spring 2010 with many additional features.
Julia: Thanks so much Jeremy! This is a fun and useful tool for anyone who loves gardening. I’m having a blast with it. I look forward to seeing what you have at Growveg.com this spring!
Keep up the good work!
