My First Question

I visited the garden of a new gardening friend yesterday. She lives in a house that was built about 5 years ago. On her computer she has a list of every plant that she has planted in her garden (microsoft word). I thought that a good winter project this year would be to catalogue my garden and I was looking at computer soft ware. Does anyone have any experience of using a computer programme designed for this purpose? Is there a particular one anyone would recommend?

 

Hi Marion I like to do my garden design/plant logging the old fashion way via paper and pencil, not too much to mess up that way!
Helen.xxx.

 

Thank you for your replies.I think it will be a winter task although I might think about it on wet days too. I have seen something called ideas genie but it seems a bit expensive (www.ideasgenie.co.uk) I played around with excel this afternoon. I want to be able to have photos of plants and pictures of gardens that have inspired me so I think it might be paper,pen and glue.

 

I place a lot of my plants on here http://www.shootgardening.co.uk/
On a plus note its handed to look up plants.

 

Thanks Jimbo I really like the look of that!

 

Shoot is excellent Marion as Jimbo says, once your plants are catalogued you get a month to month mail telling you how to care for them, can't recommend it enough.

 

Shoot sounds really good. Cheers, i'll try that out.

 

I like the idea of shoot, I may sign up to that too.

At present I have a spreadsheet that I've just started developing. Split my garden into areas, each area has a column. Listed the plants in the area in that column. Then put in hyperlinks to a second tab. The second tab lists all the plants in no particular order, one row per plant, and the hyperlink goes directly to that particular plant. Gen info in first column, propagation info in the second, likely problems or warnings in the third etc.

My "want list" is on another tab.

I plan on putting pictures via hyperlinks too, at a later date.

Then maybe a plan on one tab but I haven't figured out how to do that yet!

 

Can someone help me with something on Shoot. It wan't me to select the hardiness of my area, H1,H2,H3,H4? But what is mine?

 

Most of Britain is H8 which means that temps can be expected to go down to -12c. in a normal winter. The west coast is H9 which means a low of
-7c. However since we have had -23c here a couple or three winters ago, the zones to me seem a little arbitrary. Anyway the zones were really developed for N. America and H1 is arctic! If you live in an urban area the winter temps will be a couple of degrees higher than a rural setting. Halway down a south facing hillside with nothing to stop the frost going past is warmer than a frost pocket at the bottom of the same hill. It all comes down to knowing your own micro-climate.

 

You can easily put pictures etc on to an Excel document. Let me fiddle around see if i can get the link.....
http://www.madaboutplants.com/SaleFuture/salenow.xls
Try and see if this works. It is an old outdated file on my web site but you could have similar on your computer. Excel allows you put in hyperlinks so you can link to the pictures. I have a much larger file that refers to my stock ( when I can remember to include them). The photos are also used in my web site and on my stock list I also have a field for labels to put on plant labels when i sell them.

 

:D

 

Marion - I keep all my plants on a spread sheet. You can have as many columns as you like for height, colour, flowering period, soil preference, sun/shade etc. But the real bonus for me is that you can sort the list anyway you like.

I keep other sheets for seeds planted, plants purchased etc, and you can cut and paste between them.