There seems to be an app for everything nowadays. Some more useful than others. Some have great content but are not at all user-friendly. Others look pretty but aren’t very helpful. Here is a list of my 10 favorite user-friendly gardening apps.
- Growit!
- Gardenize
- Garden Answers Plant Identifier
- GKH Gardening Companion
- LeafSnap
- Garden Tags
- Vegetable, Fruit, & Herb Garden Planning
- Flower Checker
- iScape
- Waterbot
Growit!
Growit! is a free social networking app for people who love gardening. It uses a community approach to help you with your gardening. You can share your gardening experience with others. Use their filter feature to sort plants by color, hardiness, or type. You can upload a plant photo and ask the community for help to identify it. You can ask any gardening related questions and receive help from the community. It’s really a great app for people who enjoy social networking and gardening to come together and help each other out. For Andriod and iOS.
Gardenize
Gardenize helps you keep track of what’s in your garden, by helping you save information on what you planted, and where you planted it. You can upload photos of your plants and garden layouts, and update them when you make changes. Think of it as a gardening diary. I like the app, but bear in mind you do all the work. You upload photos, tell the app about your soil and sunlight, the seed depth you planted, how you seeded etc.
They do have a menu item called Inspiration, which links you to different websites to read gardening blogs and articles. It has a search option so you can look for what interests you.
For Android and iOS.
GKH Gardening Companion
I enjoy GardeningKnowHow.com and their app is just as good as their website. While not currently available for Android, iOS users can get a great free user-friendly app that combines a resource, a journal, a tracker, and a social network in one. This app gives you access to all Gardening Know hows articles and allows you to arrange them into your own personal “garden magazine.” You can keep track of your garden’s progress and set reminders to help you care for it. You can also be part of their gardening community and share your projects and knowledge with others. iOS only.
Garden Answers Plant Identifier
Garden Answers is a very helpful plant identifier app. You simply take a photo of the plant, flower, or tree, and garden answers will let you know what it is. If they can’t identify it, for $2.00 a horticulturist will review your photo to identify it. It’s a super easy app that I find it very helpful.
For my example, I used a flower I thought would be easy and it was. I have used this app to identify flowers in photos that I took while vacationing in the Bahamas and they were identified successfully a well. For Andriod and iOS.
LeafSnap
This is an easy to use app, however, it is a bit limited. I found it easily identified common flowers like in my above example from Garden Answers, the harder ones were not found and there is no expert to ask. I also found the ads after every search to be annoying. You can pay to remove the ads but I wouldn’t. This app makes the list because it is user friendly, but there are definitely better choices available. iOS only.
Garden Tags
It’s like the Instagram of gardening and then some. There is a social network and you post photos of your flowers, plants, or gardens and people can comment on them. You can follow people and they can follow you, just like any other social network. Many of the photos are quite lovely. Plus there is a good resource and identifier. There is a premium service available, but I stick with what’s free. Android and iOS
Vegetable, Fruit, & Herb Garden Planning
I really like this app by From Seed to Spoon. It’s helpful to both the person trying to have a great backyard garden as well as the person making a lifestyle out of living off their land. It has a ton of info and things you can do with it. It may seem confusing at first but stick with it. It helps with what to plant, when to plant, how to plant, and when to harvest. You can search by health benefit and it will advise what to grow to meet that need. It even gives you the weather and has a critter section to help identify and eliminate insects. The Blog Posts section is great too. So if you are looking to grow your own fruit, vegetables, and herbs you should absolutely give this app a try. Android and iOS.
Flower Checker
This app is super easy but may not be for everyone. In a world were people want instant answers, a day seems like a lifetime. Basically, you take a photo, pay $0.99, and within 24 hours a real human being looks at your photo and identifies it. Now, this is great if you take a lot of photos of hard to identify plants. Most of the free apps give you many options as to what your plant can be, you have to determine which is the right one. With this app, and a bit of patience, someone else does the work and you get the right answer. Android and iOS.
iScape
This app helps make your landscape design come to life before you go out and purchase expensive plants. First, you scan the area you want to design, which takes a few minutes to get done correctly. Next, you add design elements to see how they look in that space. You can save your designs for future use and updates. The app has a nice tutorial that’s worth viewing before you start. Unlike some apps, it walks you through the process in a simple manner anyone can follow. All in all a pretty cool, easy to use app iOS only.
Waterbot
This is a nice, simple app. It doesn’t try to be more than what it is. You take a picture of your plant, tell it the water requirements, and set a reminder time. That’s it. Not quite a gardening app, but plant related. It’s very helpful when you have many house plants with all different water requirements. You can add helpful notes like fertilizer requirements or when you acquired the plant. Whatever you want. The only thing that would make this app better is if when you add a photo, the app could analyze it and tell you the requirements, but its easy enough to add it yourself. Android only.
Note: There is an iOS app called Waterbot but it is to test the quality of your water.
I hope you found this post informative and give some of these great apps a try.