How can I make the Internet tell me when to plant things?

April 14, 2008 12:01 PM

Tastyfreshveggiesfilter: does anyone know of a public calendar or similar notification service to which an aspiring gardener who has dirt and planting in his genes but has little prior experience with the green stuff could subscribe, e.g., in Google Calendar or iCal?

Ideally, such a calendar would be customizable by what I'd like to plant and where I live. My goal here is to have email alerts, text messages, RSS, or whatever other Web-2.0-ish notifications one might possibly imagine when it is the best time to do certain gardening activities such as planting, fertilizing, etc. I probably wouldn't need this year after year (though given how addle-brained I've become, it couldn't hurt), but it would be hugely helpful as training wheels for a green-thumb aspirant such as myself.

Note that I'm not really soliciting good sources of planting information, etc. I've got a direct line to my grandmother, who is basically Yoda when it comes to growing things, but the problem is that I forget to seek the information out or fail to remember it when I do. I know how this is going to sound, but I just don't have time to learn everything I need to know and I'm growing weary of the "toss things in the dirt and see what comes up" form of gardening. I basically want to be an automaton for some mindless Internet application that will feed me planting dates until I begin to internalize some of the lessons of millennia of human evolution and cultural development which somehow managed not to be passed along to me. Basically, I have no pride, just a deep desire to bootstrap some basic knowledge of planting seasons and the like so that I can live up to my, heh, family legacy of greenery genius.

Anyway, I discovered a car bumper buried in my back yard a few days ago, so I'm not sure if anything good will come of sticking seeds in the soil, but I want to give it a try. And because of my previous failures, I want to enlist the powers of the Internet hordes to feed me information.

PS. It may be that this will end up going in Mefi Projects if nobody knows of anything even in the ballpark.

posted by socratic to home & garden (11 comments total)

Well, I checked out the most web 2.0 garden site i've heard of (myfolia.com), and it doesn't seem to have this kind of thing. I do have a profile there, but haven't used it very much. If you want, I can make a suggestion/ask them and then come back here and post what they said.
posted by Stewriffic at 12:19 PM on April 14, 2008

About the only thing I've ever used like that was an e-mail reminder service from Scott's for the application of X, Y or Z lawn care products.

When we lived in Atlanta, the local paper ran an occasional calendar page for the coming month - "Time to plant pumpkins" and suchlike.

Also, check with your local gardening society or county extension office for "best time to plant" stuff.

Best of luck - playing in the dirt is tonic, or it is to me anyway. Your biggest concerns are going to be the last-frost and first-frost dates and the time to germination/time to fruit for whatever it is you're going to planting. Get those things down and you're pretty much good to go with whatever it is you want to grow, assuming you can meet the sun/soil/water requirements.
posted by jquinby at 12:30 PM on April 14, 2008

Playing in dirt is indeed one of the great pleasures of life. I don't understand it when people are like "ew, dirt!" My life doesn't feel complete unless I've got some good old biomass under my fingernails (and, sadly, that means my life seldom feels complete these days).

Further refining my query, it would be unfathomably awesome if I could go to some magical website, enter in my preferences, and receive an email saying "You said you like basil. You'll need to put it in the ground in about a week, so run to the store and buy some seeds or plants! Remember, basil likes ____ sun and _____ earth, so [you may want to/no need to] buy fertilizer. Oh, and if you like basil, you might want to try catnip, which you can plant at the same time (but make sure to give it plenty of room to grow)."

Some SQL-fu, PHP-madlibs/templates, and a good community to input information should -- should -- make this sort of thing relatively easy. Though it's entirely possible that I'm the only person with such delusions as to think I can become Farmer Socratic with so little time and ability.
posted by socratic at 12:41 PM on April 14, 2008

Intriguing. You could start with something like this, adjusted for your particular hardiness zone. I also get a monthly e-mail newsletter from the Old Farmer's Almanac, and it frequently contains gardening tips.
posted by jquinby at 1:00 PM on April 14, 2008

You're in Altanta, GA which has a plant hardiness zone of 7 and a spring frost free date of March 21 (you may want to check with your grandmother about when gardeners in your area usually plant out their seedlings) and a first fall frost date of November 18. This will be the date that you will use to sow all of your seeds both indoors and out. The You Grow Girl website has the Lazy Gardener Automatic Seed Starting Chart which is really handy to figure out when you need to start vegetable seeds indoors, when they should be transplanted outside or when you can direct sow into your garden. There's also the Weekend Gardener's Grow Guide. Unfortunately it doesn't tell you when you need to put down fertilizer or anything else about what you should be doing in your garden.

The only other thing I could find was a gardening tasks by month page from Hastings Nature and Garden Centre in Atlanta, GA. There really isn't anything that I'm aware of in terms of what you are looking for. It would be great to have a website that could do all that.

As for the car bumper, I wouldn't plant any root crops like carrots or beets in it. You could probably have a nice succulent garden though.
posted by KathyK at 1:35 PM on April 14, 2008

Great idea socratic. I think the major hurdle would be the regional nature of the messages/alerts. I know that is the main thing I struggle with in getting web-based gardening info. Most of what I know I learned from my brother, who is also Yoda-like in his gardening abilities.
posted by Big_B at 1:38 PM on April 14, 2008

Oops, meant to say that March 21 is the date you use to sow your seeds.
posted by KathyK at 1:40 PM on April 14, 2008

Oddly, that's exactly the way I read it. I know I'm getting old because I didn't even make a little "sowing my seeds" joke in my head ... until now, that is.

I may bust out my programming skeelz over the next few days and see if I can come up with something. Correlating zip code with zones shouldn't be terribly difficult (one little lookup table is all it would take). Then all it would take would be populating tables with the information and providing a mechanism for customizing your location and then subscribing to various alert mechanisms. The mechanics of this are actually sounding simpler and simpler, though the data entry part would be a chore.
posted by socratic at 1:52 PM on April 14, 2008

Because you're a beginner, you probably aren't growing all that many things, right? So you need sowing and harvesting dates for a few plants. You can pretty easily do this yourself with a calendar program such as Google's and some information snagged from a few local gardening web sites such as the University of Georgia's calendar and Atlanta Botanical Garden's calendar. You can also figure dates from the You Grow Girl spreadsheet and put them into your calendar. Enter them as annual events and you can get reminders indefinitely.
posted by pracowity at 3:19 PM on April 14, 2008

You might try the Gardenaut planner. It's certainly customizable, but I don't know how much info you keep getting once you're past the initial set of recommendations. It's associated with the Gardenaut blog, which you can also customize with your location info.
posted by donnagirl at 3:24 PM on April 14, 2008

Well, if you're building something yourself, the best thing to do would be to coordinate with real time weather info. For instance, I'm not starting my eggplant seeds until nighttime temps have been above 55 for a week or so, and the expectation is that it will remain that way. A planting date isn't actually helpful in this case- if the ambient/soil temp is too low, the seeds won't thrive. Phenology is ultimately a better guide than calendar dates, so if you could tap into climate data you'd be way ahead of the planting game.
posted by oneirodynia at 5:46 PM on April 14, 2008