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SOFTWARE REVIEWS
Garden Bytes by Wendy Fries
They're as abundant as summer zucchini, as assorted as tomato varieties, and sometimes as frustrating as a garden invaded by a neighbor's bamboo...
No, they're not the latest vegetable or newest hybrid fruit, they're gardening software packages and they're everywhere. From pricey boxed wonders found at Office Depot, to dirt cheap shareware sprouting from every internet corner, the computer-savvy gardener has a broad array of gardening software from which to choose. With the introduction of this column, You Grow Girl hopes to make those choices a little easier with reviews of the bounty out there, while encouraging you to share your software experiences and suggestions, too.
So now that winter has hit with its bite and snow, how about a little tilling in a silicon garden?
As Common As Tomatoes
If you decide to buy from this electronic nursery, you'll quickly discover its most ubiquitous fruit is design/landscape software. Priced from $10US to $70US, with feature sets just as varied, most of this crop is geared toward helping you design your garden, from blueprint to shopping list. With layout tools, plant photos, advice, even mock 3D and season simulations, you can putter away dozens of hours and maybe, just maybe, have a garden plan to show for it.
Digging deeper you'll find another potentially handy tool: software catalogs. Trade in a stack of paper for one CD-ROM with multiple nursery catalogs on it, and you still get all the information you need: addresses, phone numbers, plant descriptions, care instructions, illustrations, articles. And a software catalog can also include bonus information such as how long a nursery has been in business, whether it belongs to any trade or gardening organizations, even if it's committed to seed saving, recycling and other ecological concerns.
Yet maybe you've designed your garden already and saved plenty of last year's seeds. Well then, want to start a journal?
Software garden journals are generally aimed at being your plant diary. With them you record local weather conditions, create planting schedules and reminders, document planting dates, germination times, and crop yields, catalog your seed collection, and compare entries throughout the years so you can track activities over time. Some journals also let you keep tabs on Web addresses and save HTML pages.
Then again, sometimes just looking at plant photos and daydreaming is gardening enough, in which case a software encyclopedia might green up a few low energy days. Like their print kin, software encyclopedias are rich in color photos and include botanical and common plant names, but unlike books, you can expand these electronic references with your own plant data and photos, perform quick searches, even print plant labels.
But wait, there's more...
This is merely the tip of the gardening software iceberg. We haven't touched on seed databases; calendars that help you garden by the signs of the moon; soil software; games which challenge you to create your own profitable farm; herb guides explaining natural medicines; and software on plant grafting how-tos.
In upcoming months, I'll bring you summary reviews of this Macintosh and PC-compatible profusion, separating wheat from chaff, suffering the slings and arrows of cross-platform installation, and generally finding out what's useful and what isn't - so that on those days when you can't garden, and your nails are appallingly clean, maybe you'll enjoy tilling some silicon soil.
(Let Wendy know what software you'd like to see reviewed at: [submit@yougrowgirl.com].)
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