Virtual Garden Planner Connects Gardeners and Grows Community

By its very nature, gardening is a down-to-earth endeavor, and one which requires you to get offline, get out in the sun, and get your hands in the soil, but that doesn't mean that the world of technology and social media has no place in the garden. After all, the internet is a good place to get gardening tips and ideas from, and to peruse seed catalogs and learn from others, and even if you've got a fellow gardener in your community to connect with, the web offers access to a variety of digital garden tools that can be integrated into your learning experience, such as this virtual garden planner.

I previously covered an online organic vegetable garden planner, Smart Gardener, which can help guide beginning gardeners, but this newest virtual garden planner has an added social and community-building aspect to it that could serve as a great resource for those who'd like to connect to other gardeners and get advice and support.

The Greenius online gardening platform, which is still in beta, not only enables you to plan and lay out your garden, but also features a digital garden journal to track your progress, as well as a social garden update feature (similar to the status updates/posts possible on other social platforms) that can be used to share exciting news (or a humbling learning experience!) about your garden plot for other gardeners to interact with.

"Greenius is a smart platform that helps you grown your own.
Greenius is an online platform that brings together people who love growing their food in their gardens, farms or balconies. Users easily design their garden plot and introduce the products they are growing, and then start sharing the joys and tribulations of working in the garden, growing local food and a global community." - Greenius

Greenius also includes a question feature that allows your gardening questions to be posted for the community to answer and interact with, which might be very helpful, especially if you're gardening in challenging conditions or trying to grow new (to you) varieties of veggies. The question and update platforms use hashtags such as #berries or #lettuce to enable the search for users and posts which include the crops or questions you might have about those plants.

The garden planner layout function is simple and easy to use, as it works by just dragging and clicking to place the beds, and selecting which variety of plants will go there. Obviously this depends on the size of your garden, as my 100' by 100' garden with many growing beds and fruit trees will take quite a bit longer to set up than a small garden, but it's fairly simple to create and edit your garden layout with Greenius.

This digital garden planner platform is also rolling out a series of growing guides for different veggies, which aim to provide a practical guide for new gardeners, including information about when to sow, how to grow, and when to harvest. It looks like there is a lot of room for improvement for this platform, but like many beta offerings, the best way to help it grow is to use it and give the developers feedback.

While my usual mode of laying out my garden beds on paper, which usually end up getting soaked with water or covered in dirt, is effective and works for me, I often find that I misplace those plans and have to either re-draw them or just do without and wing it, so if you resemble those remarks, you might find that a virtual garden planner such as Greenius is a better option.

Have you ever used a digital garden planner such as Greenius? Did it help to make it easier to keep track of the details of your garden beds?