By Tim Lenahan, MakeUseOf – March 25, 2010 at 05:31PM
When spring is upon us, the time has come to make our way back to the backyards. Most of us have been cooped up in the cold and are ready for some fresh air and a project to keep us busy. Why not start that garden you’ve been meaning to get to? With the help of the Internet you can have that green thumb you’ve always wanted.
There are several types of places on the Internet that can help you in your gardening pursuits such as online garden planners, social networks of like-minded gardening types, informational sites, and more! Let me share some sites and tools that should help.
Garden Puzzle – Create Your Design In 5 Minutes
Mentioned in the MakeUseOf Directory, Garden Puzzle is an online tool that makes designing your garden simple. In 4 easy steps you’ll have a design that will help you figure out how to start a garden. Just upload a photo of your garden area, indicate what kind of climate and soil conditions you are dealing with, choose plants you want to add (they also suggest some for you), and create visuals for each season you deal with.
Garden Planner
Unlike Garden Puzzle, Garden Planner gives a blueprint-type aerial view giving you a good view of the layout. In fact, it is very similar to a blueprint home design program. There are many plants and objects to choose from and you can even even download it as a program to your Windows desktop (the desktop version is a 15 day trial).
iBotanika – Discover, Connect & Share Your Life In Green
iBotanika is a site for anyone from the beginner gardener to the profession botanist. It is a place to catalog your gardening progress, find needed information and connect with other plant enthusiasts. Unlike some of the larger social networking sites, iBotanika is a focused community that is specific to plant growers. You can upload pictures of yourself and your plants, indicate the location of your plants and get your own greenhouse (virtual).
MyPlantID
My wife and I just bought a house and this spring will be the first time we will be working on the yard and the gardens. I can see MyPlantID being useful as we seek to find out what plants are already planted. This site offers a user generated database which helps in the identification of plants. You can either search for your plant on the site or submit a photo of your plant for other users to help in the identification.
Here are a few more sites that can help you with your gardening needs:
- The Garden Helper
- About.com: Gardening
- About.com: Landscaping
- OrganicGardening.com
- National Gardening Association website
And even more from the blogosphere:
See, the Internet can be useful for the every day things such as gardening! You can find tools, sites and even blogs that help you with every part of the gardening process from plant identification, to gardening social networks and even blogs to follow and gain advice from.
Since the Internet is so large, I am sure there are more tools, sites and blogs that other people find useful in their gardening pursuits. If you have a site, tool or blog that you often consult when gardening, please do share them with us.
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