Plant Planner App from Safer

by Doug
(In His Garden)

First, I've been a big fan of Safer's organic insect control products for many years; I even used them in the greenhouses and nursery back in the day.

And they should have stuck to what they know - insect and disease control - because this app isn't worth what you pay for it (free).

It's a "garden planner" - the first step is to identify garden location and name your garden (just in case you want to differentiate between garden beds or areas I assume). So far so good.

You are then presented with 4 tabs across the bottom of the screen (Browse, My Garden, Planner, Weather)

Browsing, as expected, gives you a range of plants with descriptions, so with the encouragement of the "Add Plant to My Garden" button, I added a bunch of vegetable and flower plants to my gardening list.

My Garden - I then went to this tab and sure enough, the plants I had chosen were all listed there, so far - so good.

Now, I assumed, the computer magic would happen next and under the planning tab, all the info in the plant descriptions would be ordered for seed sowing, planting in the garden, multiple cropping etc.

Press "Planner" - there's the last plant I had added to the list back in My Garden with another tab asking me to add it to my garden. (I must have done something wrong I said to myself.) Clicked on the tab again and there's a list of my plants except for the last added "bush beans", there's now two of them. If I delete one, both disappear. So I leave it there doubled.

OK - so where's the planning? Ah, there isn't any. It's just a list of plants again. Fail.

Maybe the weather is a really funky addition to the app? Go to the last weather tab, put in my nearest city, get a plain weather report, nothing fancy - not even sure it's accurate. Click on my WeatherEye app to check it, it's close. Go back to the weather app to check it again and it makes me re-enter my location - one click away and it forgot who I was.

I'm not even going to get into the accuracy of the descriptions, let me say I simply giggled and wondered who in heck had written these expecting them to be clear and easily understood. Ah, I can't resist one small example; with bush beans the distance between plants is given as 24-30 inches and the distance between plants after thinning is 3-6 inches. Some how, some where, a copy-editor screwed up very badly. Trust me, I could go on and on skewering the descriptions but I'll save us both the time, they're uniformly confusing.

The only note-taking you can do is to add your planting date - no other notes are permitted.

Don't bother wasting the space on your ipad with this one, you can't shop or keep records with it, the programming still has bugs, the "planning" doesn't and, well, it's just not at all useful.

If you want a vegetable garden planner, this is the one you really should check out