When I’m not putzing around outdoors, I’m inside under my laptop. And when the weather’s too foul for gardening, I’ve found a virtual world where I can putz around the garden as much as I wish: online vegetable garden planners GrowVeg.com and PlanGarden.com.

Why Plan? And why Online?

Two impulses come over me in spring. First, when I’m confronted with ten blank garden beds, I get stalled. Where to start? Which seeds? What if I need that bed later for???—and soon, it’s nail-biting time.

Or, I’m so hot to trot, I plant the whole thing in one April weekend—and two months later, 3 dozen lettuces mature all at once, with no room left for the zucchini (maybe that’s a good thing…)

A plan, made indoors when it’s raining, makes me slow down and think. I can “virtual-plant” seeds, shuffle them around, see how it looks and start over again—all without committing precious seeds to ground.

I discovered these programs last year, and I’ve found they offer features that make an on-computer plan more helpful than one on paper. For one, they communicate. PlanGarden lets you create your own blog, share your garden plans with a fellow gardener, or email your plans or notes. GrowVeg can email you planting reminders, timed for your frost-free dates and any crop successions you plan.

If you plug in local produce prices and record your harvest, PlanGarden tracks how much money you saved—or if you’re a market gardener, how much you EARNED selling your produce.

Crop rotation is always a good practice, and GrowVeg remembers where you planted a given family of veg in years before and warns you against, say, planting cabbage where you planted broccoli, another cole crop, last year.

Both program will generate Plant Lists that tell you when to sow indoors, outdoors, and to harvest. Both give you places to keep notes and records. And while they aren’t designed for flower-beds, PlanGarden does offer seven “flowers” among its pull-downs; you could modify each program with some creative re-labeling. PlanGarden seems also to be able to send in EXCEL format.

How do they work?

In both these programs, you create a grid the size of your yard, even your whole property. Then you draw garden beds of any size, positioned in place. Then you fill your beds with vegetables pulled from a pop-up window. Voila: a map of this season’s vegetable garden. The plants come labeled either generically (“carrots”) or by variety (“Nantes Coreless”). 

As you drag-n-drop your veg, both programs build a database of your choices. It’s from these spreadsheets that GrowVeg is able to email you a reminder of what to plant and when. PlanGarden uses this information to record the market-value of your harvest.

Both plans let you label beds and plants, either by type (“carrot”) or varietal (“Nantes Coreless”). Both have schedules for planting, timed to the frost-free dates you plug in.

And neither has ads! Instead, these are by subscription ($25/year for GrowVeg, $20/year for PlanGarden) with 30-day and 45-day free trials. You can plan and print for free, and they’ll save your records and catch you on the come-back next year or whenever you’re ready for succession crops. Your first garden plan can be transferred to the new growing season, either as a blank slate or as a copy with all those plants used last. 

One weakness of GrowVeg.com: your plant-filled areas are either rows or squares, placed (and rotated if needed) upon the outlines of your garden beds.

WWW.GrowVeg.com

GrowVeg.com’s plans are designed for the smaller yard, no more than 96′ square. It CAN work on sites up to 1000′ sq, but it slows down a LOT. You can either create several smaller gardens, or investigate PlanGarden.) 

GrowVeg has a more pleasant graphic interface. You can rotate areas to be filled with plants, and they have gentler, pastel colorings that don’t conflict as much with labeling.

It also seems to have more plants in its menu. A ribbon of eatables, Apple–Zucchini, runs across the top of the grid; from that, you drag-n-drop vegetables, berries, or herbs down to the area you want to populate with that eatable. When you drag the icon’s corners, an area (or row, your choice) fills with more of that veg, each placed at the proper spacing for that plant (which you can adjust if you’re close-cropping as in the Square-Foot Gardening system). If you planted the same type of plant in that spot in prior years, the program makes that area glow red!, warning you to heed to proper crop rotation and plug that cabbage transplant elsewhere!

As you fill your space, the program creates a Plant List that tells you how many of each veg to plant or grow on as transplants (very helpful if your indoor growing space is small). 

If you double-click on the “i” button, a GrowGuide for that vegetable will pop up offering growing tips and information for that plant—a feature unique to GrowVeg.com. I’m looking forward to standing in my garden and iPhoning GrowVeg’s GrowGuides when I need a reminder how deep to plant, say, beet seeds. 

Double-click on an icon on your plan, and its own record pops up, with a space for your own notes and a way to specify its variety.

GrowVeg.com was started by Jeremy Dore, a Brit who dug up his front yard to grow vegetables in 2005 and, in November 2007, started developing this online planner for both UK and US gardeners. I have to say, his program is the better looking of the two: more attractive, more organized, more personable, and his vegie icons are downright cute.

PlanGarden.com's plant "fills" aren't as pretty, but the program can fill a garden bed with a square-foot-grid

PlanGarden.com

The size of a GrowVeg garden is limited to 96′x96′, while PlanGarden allows for properties large and small. You can define your whole acreage, then zoom in to the subset used for your 20′x30′ vegie patch and leave the rest developable for later. You can also pan much more easily in PlanGarden than in GrowVeg.

In its “layout” mode, PlanGarden offers a wider variety of shapes: triangles, for instance, can be dropped down and reshaped, while in GrowVeg, you must draw a triangle line by line. It’s “ellipse” and “curve” shapes allowed me to include my long, curvy boundary border. For “Square Foot Gardening” fans, PlanGarden can apply a SFG grid to any square or rectangular bed (GrowVeg says it will work in a SFG grid sometime this summer).

Its “Manage Veg” mode doesn’t give you as many choices of vegetables, nor does it include growing information—a real lapse. But it does offer flower icons. And it does build a calendar for planting, maintenance, and harvest times, and its spreadsheet for maintenance looks detail-heavy. And it already has succession gardening in mind, allowing you to schedule plantings and harvests by quarters or divided season.

For those who want to see how much $ they saved by growing their own, PlanGarden can keep a running tally, using local prices, of the value of your harvest. I’d think a Market Gardener could use this feature to track sales—WHAT a boon!

Other Planners

I’ve looked at a couple other planners. “Vegetablegardenplanner.com” is mostly an online gardening journal that’s free for up to 50 plants in a single garden. It allows photos, and it has a “Family Feeding Calculator” (which I didn’t try, but could be interesting).

Better Homes & Gardening magazine online (www.bhg.com) has an over-simplified planner. Frankly, they seem more interested in putting online ads before you. However, enrolling at this site will get you Garden Porn emailed to you on a daily basis.

Finally, for the true techie, there’s Google SketchUp. It’s a massive, free, downloadable design program in 3D. I’ve planned my kitchen potager several times over on it so I could “walk through” my garden and see it and its features (virtual greenhouse) through various points of view. This is a near-professional grade architectural design tool, and thus complex: I lost HOURS trying to build a simple 2×4, and trying to rotate it into position drove me crazy. Still… there’s a library of downloadable fabrications online that you can use, for free.

So next time you’re stuck indoors, go check out www.growveg.com and www.plangarden.com.

Though I’ve been gardening off and on for 25 years, it was the long snows of last winter that drove me absolutely MAD to garden (and maybe you, too?)

During weeks of white and cold, I kept my world green by rereading many of my gardening books. Then, for Christmas, I was given Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which has shown countless people how much energy goes needlessly into industrial food production, how much better it is for us and for the world if we could produce our food close to home.  As I nodded “yes YES YES!” all the way through the book, I was also saying to myself:

Maybe something like this happened to you, too. Certainly my growing interest seems in sync with a national trend. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s fuel/food price inflation, maybe it’s just that we want to be healhier, homey, happier. But news on farmers, slow food, the locavore movement seems everywhere, They’re even growing their own vegies at the White House!

It’s growing locally, too: when a class on starting a vegetable garden was announced last spring in the Beachcomber, 60 people showed up. The Food Bank got local funding to start its own vegetable garden. We’ve seen stories on small farms and giant-corn growers, classes on kitchen potagers and food preservation. Just last week, the Beachcomber ran a story about high school kids growing fresh produce for school lunches. Kids, eating their own vegetables!

So that’s why this blog: to learn what the Island has to teach us about planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, and caring for our pieces of the garden that is Vashon. 

We Islanders have wonderful resources for gardening. We have greater access to land than most. We can gather all kinds of natural amendments: leaves, seaweeds, barnyard poo. We can get gravel, stones and concrete cheaply, close by. We have great nurseries, wonderful garden tours, farmers and a farmers’ market, and more than our fair share of Cranks and Originals, those obsessive gardeners who show us what wonders can be produced from our land.

The articles and the blog are a natural offshoot of me tracking down Vashon experts to find out what makes Vashon gardens work. Some of that, you may already have seen in the Beachcomber: my articles on starting seeds, growing tomatoes, sowing a fall/winter garden.

I want to write about Vashon’s particular soils, its weather conditions and patterns, what plants do best in Maury gravel or in north-end blue clay. I want to walk the fields, snoop the gardens, ask the Cranks all the questions I can think of, just so I can learn to grow better vegetables and have a more wonderful garden. And if I’m writing for you as well as me, my information will become more organized, hopefully more amusing, and definitely more complete than some scattered notes scribbled for my personal use.

So watch for interviews from other gardeners, growers and experts. I’ll tell of my own goof-ups, dreams, and small victories, and I hope you will share yours via the Comments section. I’ll trial vegetable varieties in the garden and in the kitchen, and I’ll share photos of tours here and “abroad” off-island.

I hope these articles inspire you AND me to become better gardeners and to know our Island a little better.

Let’s Garden On, Vashon!