Can you recommend software for garden/farm planning?

December 13, 2016 11:07 AM

Preferences:

• Offline
• Preferably OS compatible, but will settle for Windows if I have to
• Can include outbuildings, livestock, and the like
• Provides some sort of time planning support - successive plantings, crop rotation, a schedule for when to sow, and when to harvest, etc

I’m happy to pay, but I’d like to know it’s worth it. I’ve tried the online gardenplanner.*.com. I want to like it, but it’s too buggy, and the recurring cost irritates me. Please tell me something like this exists.
posted by slipthought to Home & Garden (4 answers total)

Where are you on the planet? - there may be a tailored solution (eg via a university extension service). Also due to the specificity of growing crops solutions are likely to be geographically-specific - timing is more of a horticultural art and hardly predictable. How large is the site -or is this something you want to do on more than one site?

Do you need a graphical/map-type solution/system? I don't know anything serious (that doesn't also have a steep learning curve AND cost a fortune) that would handle this graphically (or at all). I would tend to use Sketchup Make (free) and excel, plus a tool like Flux to work between them - there may be free tools to do this and there are other plugins to get data out of Sketchup.
posted by unearthed at 4:22 PM on December 13, 2016

I found this ATTRA Question of the Week which may give some leads.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:47 AM on December 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Unearthed, it’s big space, dozens of acres. I’ve been working with spreadsheets and paper notebooks for gardening, which is okay, but I always end up missing something (like forgetting to seed my fall crops this year! Ended up having to buy transplants, which is just silly, since I have the time, seed, and space to do it myself).

As I’m looking to expand with more crops and more animals, the physical planning is difficult for me to visual without a graphical aid. I’ve tried using Gimp, etc, for mapping, but it gets overwhelming having to look up all the dimensions and spacing.

I used Sketchup and another free home-design specific website to design our house, and I’ve got the skills to do my own database, so I suppose I should just suck it up and do it the hard way.

But I was so, so hoping someone else had figured this out already. :(

We have a great extension office, but no cool tools from them for planning - just mountains of pdfs.

I am not familiar with Flux - I like that idea.
posted by slipthought at 7:07 AM on December 14, 2016

I use garden plan pro for this purpose. I have used it for years and am very satisfied, especially with the support response when there have been issues/questions. They send monthly e-mail reminders for what to be gardening that month.
posted by rabidsegue at 12:02 PM on December 14, 2016