Planter: Garden Planner 4+

This Planter app is awesome! Select your garden size and get to building. You can also make raised bed outlines on it. It has hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables and flowers and tells you all the info you need to know about them. It gives you planting times for your area and lists companion and combatant plants for every single plant. It even tells you what disease, pest and beneficial insects you can find on each plant. I find myself killing time just building my dream gardens while also learning about everything I’m planting. Admittedly the creating a garden option is kind of limited without a subscription but you can get a good idea of what the app is like. Plus, a subscription is inexpensive enough to try once and see what you think about the full version. You can also use their website on your computer so you can have a much larger screen to work with. It’s also getting my kid in to gardening as she loves to build her own garden on it and she’s learning about plants along the way. I simply can’t recommend this app enough for beginner gardeners or someone looking to have all the information in one place.

This app has been absolutely amazing! Not only is it well laid out so that nothing is confusing or hard to find, but it is packed full of useful information! I can look up pests, diseases, growing season, and more about each type of plant. It will also tell me whether or not two plants will benefit each other if there are planted next to each other or not. I like that I can also pick a variety so I can lay out my garden correctly and most efficiently. Also has a section (seed box) where you can input your seeds so you can keep track of what year they were bought and how much you have! I have noticed that the larger gardens are still in beta but I haven’t had any issues with them. I think the only thing that was a small inconvenience is that not every brand of seeds are in the app. Where I live there are some very popular brands that are not in the system. However, the app allowed me to input the brand anyway and save it to my list. So all in all a wonderful, easy to use app that is packed full of amazing information and resources as well as fun to use!

I started using this app to plan out my garden as a novice. At first, I just wanted an app to help me remember what I planted where (I didn’t have fancy signs or even stakes handy to label anything!) Then I found this app which goes beyond simple mapping with the companion/combative plant feature, telling you what plants like and dislike each other as neighbors. Wow! I went ahead and upgraded, not because I really need the features (the basic app has all I need as a beginner with a single 10’ x 10’ plot) but to support the app so it can continue to exist and improve.

I mentioned the app to my mom who is an expert gardener and sometimes struggles with technology. I thought she might find it interesting, but didn’t expect her to use and enjoy the app as much as I do! She even learned a few plant relationships herself, which is amazing considering her encyclopedic knowledge. It is a testament to this app’s intuitiveness and reliability that a less tech-savvy person like my mom was able to master it and get so much value from it.