Green-fingered gods and goddesses, how is your garden looking right now? Is it beginning to burst into life with lush, green foliage and beautiful blooms? Or, is it looking a little…drab? Well, whether you fancy yourself as a bit of an Alan Titchmarsh or have been known to kill a cactus (don’t worry, us too!), there are a few bits of technology that could really help you out. Here are four of the best gardening apps we think you really need to get your hands on this summer to help your garden grow!
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Grow Your Own. Grow Your Own is an app developed by the Royal Horticultural Society, so you know it’s going to be high quality and suitable for British gardeners like you! The Sophie Allport team think this a great app for beginner gardeners as it tells you what you should be doing at particular times of the year, and comes with a chart to help you see when specific crops should be planted and harvested. With a to-do list for every plant in your garden, you won’t put a foot wrong with this app helping you every step of the way.
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Garden Answers Plant Identification. Got a gardening problem and don’t have a knowledgeable neighbour or grandparent to help you solve it? Worry not…we’ve discovered the Garden Answers Plant Identification app. This app is suitable for iPhone and Android and will tell you why your leaves are curling, what the strange substance is on your trees, and why your plants are falling prey to disease. All you have to do is snap a photo of the plant in question, submit it to the app, and the experts will diagnose the problem and suggest a cure. You can even ask the app to identify any plants you don’t recognise!
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Into Gardens. This is a beautiful iPad app from an English garden designer called James Alexander Sinclair. Consider it as being a bit like a digital magazine; it’s an app that offers budding gardeners with lots of great articles, inspirational videos and helpful photos, so you’re bound to find plenty of material to keep you enthralled while you sip a cup of tea in the garden. And, we love that the iPhone and Android version of this app allows you to take photographs, save them and caption your flower finds as you go. So, you can use it as a kind of journal and instant camera to document the plants you’re working hard to grow, as well as using it for its ‘magic parcels’ function, offering users with gardening, planting and lawn care advice.
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BBC Weather. If there’s one thing good gardeners need to know about, it’s what the heavens have in store for their them throughout the week! Plan your gardening, lawn care, watering and soil treatments around the weather, using the BBC weather app to keep you in the loop. The team at Sophie Allport team think this app is particularly useful if we’re predicted droughts or heavy rains throughout the summer, but like it just as much for knowing whether or not we’ll need to don our sun hats, pull on our wellies or toggle up in a raincoat to get back in the garden…! This weather app is free to download for Android and iPhone and has excellent ratings by gardeners who appreciate mother nature’s influence on their outdoor spaces.
Do you have any gardening apps you’d recommend? Or do you prefer to play it by ear!? Let us know!
