I noticed some crappy reviews of this App in the App store that it really didn’t deserve. If you thought that something as simple as sticking a seed into the earth would be easy to write an App for you would be wrong. Within the many Apps that come up on a search for ‘garden’ in Apple’s App Store there are many weeds and few treasures. Add into the mix the divisive schools of thought between back yard growers and the botanists who write the Apps. All of this means that before you go downloading your way to disappointment, that you’ll need to sit down and think over your garden plan beforehand. Think about what your main interest is. Will you be putting in a flower garden this year? Would you be more inclined to line up containers on your patio or fire escape stairs? Or is this going to be the year that you dig up the south facing side of your yard and buy out the Burpee Seed Catalog? Gardeners may fall into two categories after all, just like with video games incidentally. Are you a casual gardener or are you a true enthusiast?
Master Gardener App Review
Posted by geek-woman on March 19th, 2010
Apps like Garden Log, iGarden, My Garden, and Pocket Garden, all have very limited plant lists. If you know you’ve got tomato plants and you don’t much care what variety they are or any of the other minutia about the plant then these Apps might be fine for you. There is a light version of Pocket Garden that might suit the needs of anyone who is planting a single veggie garden this season. It does give you the choice of several kinds of each veggie. They also have Pocket Herbs too, but it is almost completely redundant if you have Pocket Garden. Garden Log’s only function is to create a graphical time line that charts the growth of your plants. That didn’t work for me, since long before planting time, I needed an App to record everything I bought, while I still had the time to do so.
I ended up with Master Gardener, and I love it. It was 3.99 though it certainly isn’t for everyone. You need to use it along with Wikipedia and look up and enter everything into Master Gardener by botanical name. As tedious as that may sound, the deep geekiness of gardening only starts there. If you really want to know the history, the roots of your plants, then you go get the Latin name. What that actually does for you is to narrow it down to the exact type of plant that you have. So if you don’t know that peas are pisum and you thought solanum tuberosum was a Harry Potter spell, you might not want Master Gardener as an App. If you are willing to nerd up a notch though, it is certainly worth it. It gives you the most comprehensive shelf space to enter information about each plant. You can have all the propagating, nurturing and harvesting info, including where you got the plant or seeds, when you bought them, and when you’ve planted them. All of that information is crucial especially if you are starting seedlings indoors now. I think the main plus of this App is that it allows you to have multiple gardens. You can have a To Do List and there is a Journal too. Which none of the other dozen or so Apps I tested had. It took a long time to find something that could replace my pen and paper garden journal that I have kept over the years. But Master Gardener does it all I give it 10 Giant Sunflowers (Helianthus Gigantus) out of 10.
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