If you are a gardening enthusiast, you probably spend a lot of time in your garden. Gardening entails a lot of work, and most of the time, you may not have all the knowledge about soil, water, etc. Having the best vegetable garden apps at your disposal can come in handy when going about your gardening business.
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Why You Need the Best Vegetable Garden Apps
Some gardeners may not appreciate the usefulness of vegetable garden apps. But here are reasons why every gardener should consider having the best vegetable garden apps as their ally in gardening:
• It is challenging for a beginner to manage everything since you will have little knowledge of soils and plants
• An app functions as an assistant and can guide you in planning and designing the vegetable garden
• You will not need a separate notebook to record the progress of your garden plants.
• It makes access to weather information effortless. This saves time that you would otherwise spend on google searching for specific information on plants.
You also need the best vegetable garden apps to help you with the following:
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1. Garden Planning
When planning your vegetable garden, you need to know certain things about your garden soil, plants, and season for the plants.
A vegetable gardening app comes in handy as an assistant in helping you come up with a good design that is suitable for your garden and the plants that you would like to plant.
2. Soil and Seed Selection
It’s important to select the best soil and seeds for your garden. This will minimize your efforts on plant care while at the same time maximising your harvest.
A vegetable garden app will inform you which soil is best for which vegetable plant. You can then detect your soil moisture, pH, and light to test if your soil fits the bill of the plant you would like to grow in your garden. A soil testing kit such as XLUX Soil Tester Meter can be of help.
Additionally, vegetable garden apps can help you when it comes to choosing seeds. When choosing seeds, you need to know the zone where you are living and the sunlight that falls on your garden. Most vegetable garden apps have a seed catalog that comes in handy in seed selection.
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3. Ideas on Taking Care of Your Vegetable Garden
Taking care of your vegetable garden while the plants are growing is a great determinant of the harvest that you will receive. Therefore, you need to spend time getting rid of weeds and other parasites growing in the garden.
A vegetable gardening app will inform you when you are meant to carry out weeding and how to go about it.
Also, as part of taking care of your garden, you need to water your plants on time. Vegetable plants such as spinach and cucumber need a lot of water. These best vegetable garden apps will remind you when you need to water your plants.
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4. Information on Seasons and Weather for Vegetables
Having incorrect information on seasons and weather that are good for the plants in your vegetable garden can be catastrophic. You can get this information online or from books, but even easier through mobile vegetable gardening apps.
These best vegetable garden apps are handy, and they get frequent updates with the latest weather reports. Apps such as Garden Plan Pro and When to Plant will give you information from 5000 weather stations across the United States.
Best Vegetable Garden Apps
1. Garden Answers
Garden Answers app will help you to identify any plant and its probable disease by simply clicking a photo of the diseased plant. They have more than 20,000 plants in their database.
Apart from using the app to identify garden plants and diseases that could be affecting your garden plants, you can use this app to ask a garden expert questions. They will respond with the best answers that make fighting pests and weeds easy.
The app is available both for Android and iOS users.
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2. Veggie Garden Planner
The Veggie Garden Planner offers you well-arranged information on planning and designing your own home vegetable garden.
Its features include:
• It works on a freemium model. Before you purchase, you can enjoy all the features at no cost so that you can have the assurance of what you are buying.
• The app will show you sowing and harvest time in tabular form after you have chosen the vegetable plant you would like to grow. It will also show you interactions that exist between vegetables.
• You can find good and bad neighbours to your plants by using Patch Plan Editor. You can also easily manage plant rotation using a Veggie Garden Planner.
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3. When To Plant
Apart from being a perfect fit for vegetable growers, anyone who loves growing cover crops, herbs, fruit, and flowers will find this app useful. It will give you information on the best planting times for your vegetables.
This app uses a database of around 5,000 weather stations across North America to calculate the best time for growing.
It has the following features:
• Has the capacity to calculate Planting dates from your ZIP code information and a weather report of that area
• Has full growing information for more than 120 vegetables, herbs, cover crops, fruits, and companion planting flowers. You can easily select the best vegetable in different seasons.
• Has sufficient information on each plant, such as best soil type and sun requirements, sowing instructions, and harvesting time.
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4. Grow Planner
As its name indicates, this app allows you to sketch a dream vegetable garden on your iPad or iPhone.
Its features include:
• It allows you to specify the dimensions of your vegetable garden and add multiple beds to your garden layout. You can then choose crops from a total of 140 crops, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers, and cover crops.
• The app is the best companion for Canada and US growers since it can detect 5000 weather stations across the United States and Canada to calculate recommended planting times.
• The app allows you to search for seeds from online vendors. If you are online, the app can provide gardening content from Mother Earth News Magazine on pest control, how to maximize harvest, how to control weeds, and more.
• The app allows you to plan more than one garden in the same app, and this helps in crop rotations.
5. Garden Plan Pro
This is an award-winning app that was featured in Apple’s introductory video at the World Wide Developers Conference in June 2014. It can help you to plan the perfect vegetable, fruit, and herb garden right on your iPhone or iPad.
It has the following features:
• Information on around 190 plants with thousands of varieties available in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, EU, and South Africa
• A flexible garden design feature that allows you to design a garden of any shape. You can add rows, single plants, blocks or SFG squares and rearrange them until you get your dream garden
• The app guides you on how to rotate crops according to the season of your area
• The app connects to 5000 weather stations, helping you find a suitable time to sow, plant and harvest. You can record this information in a chart.
• The app has a blog section that educates on how to plan, start seeds, avoid pests and produce a bountiful harvest.
