Vegetable Gardening Apps For Your Phone or iPad

Raise your hand if you love to grow vegetables! Raise your hand if you like cool apps for your phone! Why not combine the two and download a couple apps specifically geared for vegetable gardeners?  It might seem a little strange - gardening has to do with getting physical outside and getting as far from your phone as possible, right? But keep an open mind here; these apps can educate you on various aspects of planning and growing your veggies and make your gardening life a little easier.

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Check these out:

Gardening Plant Care Videos. All the How To videos you could want, in your own personal phone library. There's everything from continuous lettuce harvesting tips to how to graft a fruit tree to how to grow vegetables upside down.

Garden Compass. One neat thing you can do with this app is take a picture of a plant or problem/pest you want identified, send it to their experts and you will get a response within 24 hours.

Vegetable Garden Planner. Want to know how many seeds or seedlings to plant to feed your family? This is the app for you. No more planting enough to feed an army, unless you want to feed an army.

Vegetable Gardening (Grow Planner). This app provides an all-around education - how to start, how to plant, how to harvest and what to do with your harvest (canning, cooking, freezing, drying, pickling and eating). It can even show you how to create a root cellar and how to grow herbs indoors.

Gardening Toolkit. A wealth of information here. It gives you info on vegetable plants as well as how to plant them - seed depth, days to germination, when to sow. This application will even give you info on companion planting. You can store all the material on plants and trees you're interested in in one spot for quick reference.

eWeather HD. You can see your current temperature and precise hourly forecasts.  It even has a radar screen. As a gardener, you know how quickly a hard freeze or hail can damage your tender plants.

Now obviously an app won't grow your veggies for you. There is no substitution for getting out there and getting your hands dirty; you not only grow vegetables but you grow experienced. But hey, if a cool phone app can help you in any way get in better with Mother Nature, then go for it - and have fun planning your new garden!

Can You Grow Vegetables Indoors?

Don't let anybody tell you that growing vegetables indoors is not possible. It certainly is! An indoor vegetable garden can allow anybody living in an apartment or other restricted space to enjoy the satisfaction of eating their own home-grown vegetables. It just takes a little know-how and planning.

Certain plants are obviously more suited than others to your aim of growing vegetables indoors. Large plants that enjoy colder climates, like the brassica family or leeks, are not the best choice for growing in a small apartment. Most root vegetables require a deeper depth of soil than you probably want to provide. However, if you have a large apartment that does not have heating directly under the windows, you can grow larger plants by placing rectangular containers on the floor in front of your windows.

Herbs are a very popular choice for people growing vegetables indoors because many of them are small plants that will grow happily on a windowsill. Herbs like fresh air and you will probably find they grow better if you can leave a window slightly open for them during the day, as long as the weather is not too cold. They also prefer well-drained soil so they are best watered little and often.

Growing your own vegetables in containers means you can move them indoors or outdoors as needed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course, you do not need to restrict your indoor vegetable garden to herbs. You can grow other plants too.  For example, tomatoes enjoy sunny, sheltered spots and are perfect for growing indoors near a sunny window. They can grow rather tall and require a trellis to climb up, so you might want to site them on a small table or shelf near to your window rather than have them on the actual window sill where they could block a lot of light by growing in front of the whole window. Leafy greens like lettuce often grow well indoors as well.

It is important to choose the right containers for your plants. A seedling starts out very small but it can grow into a large plant. In order to avoid disturbing it later, it is best if, after germination, seedlings are transferred into the container appropriate for the final plant.

You will also need to think about what to put in the containers. While plants will happily grow in regular earth outside, they need more nutritionally-adapted soil to grow indoors. This is because they do not have the benefit of all of the microorganisms and other nutrients that are available in the deep beds outside. So you will need to buy compost or soil that is suitable for the specific plants that you are planning to grow. You cannot necessarily use the same compost for everything. For example, there are many brands of compost designed specifically for tomato plants.

Of course, your lifestyle can be the difference between success and failure when growing vegetables indoors. Plants in containers dry out very easily, and the more shallow the container, the truer this is. If you spend a lot of time away from home for work or social reasons, you may find it difficult to give your plants the water and other care that they need, unless you have a friendly neighbor who will take care of them for you.

Even more important are the conditions inside your home. If you have a north-facing apartment with small windows, it will be difficult for your plants to get enough sunlight. You will have to choose them very carefully to produce any worthwhile crops.

However, if you keep these points in mind, there is no reason why you should not have an indoor garden to be proud of. With a little care and planning, most apartment or city dwellers can enjoy all the benefits of successfully growing fresh vegetables indoors.

Growing Vegetables For Beginners

Growing vegetables for beginners is probably simpler than you think. Although there are some important rules that you need to follow, vegetables are like all other forms of life - they want to grow! So all you really need to do is make sure they have what they need and protect them from harm. Easy, right?

The first step in growing vegetables for beginners is to make a list of the vegetables that you want to grow and check that you have the right conditions for them. If you live in a temperate climate with relatively mild temperatures and sufficient rain, you can probably grow most of the best known veggies that are used in traditional cooking.

A small vegetable garden in May outside of Austin, Texas (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of the easiest vegetables to grow in your garden include: carrots and beets from the root vegetables category; beans; cucumbers and zucchini or squashes; and lettuce and radishes for salad. If you start out with these, you will have a good variety of vegetables for the dinner table. They also provide some variety in your gardening experience, because they grow in different ways.

You can add tomatoes if you have a good sunny spot for them but be warned, tomatoes are not as easy to grow successfully as you might think. They can be susceptible to disease, and they need a lot of water and sun. However, overall they are not too difficult, and vine-ripe tomatoes are well-worth the bit of extra effort!

The next step in growing vegetables for beginners is to plan your vegetable garden.   You can grow vegetables in your flowerbeds, of course. They do not necessarily need to be all together in one place. However, it is sometimes easier if they are in a particular spot. You will want this to be somewhere that gets sun, but is not too hot and dry; is well-drained, not boggy; is sheltered from strong winds; and is easily accessible for you to water the plants.

This last point is very important. Many people site their vegetable garden a long way from the house because the vegetables are not as attractive as flowers. But your vegetable crops will do much better if you can reach them easily, and especially if you see them all the time. 'Out of sight, out of mind', as they say!

If you are growing pole beans or other climbing vine-type vegetables, you will need to give them something to climb. Keep in mind that they will shade your other plants so you may want to have them on the north side of your vegetable patch. If your vegetable garden is bordered by a wall, of course you will want the tallest plants at the back, against the wall.

Blossoms on a tomato plant in a residential vegetable garden. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You will need to prepare the soil by digging to clear out any weeds and then adding a good layer of compost. Then you can begin to plant. Check instructions on the seed packets for planting dates.

Some seeds are best not planted directly into the garden but germinated in seed trays indoors or in a greenhouse before being planted out as seedlings. This can take a couple of weeks, but it is worthwhile because you will not waste space on seeds that do not germinate or have plants growing too close together. You can choose the strongest-looking seedlings to put out in the garden, and space them properly, as well as giving them a head start if you have a short growing season.

Good luck with your garden planning! With these tips you should find that growing vegetables - even for beginners - is easy as well as fun.

Using A Garden Planner To Plan This Year's Vegetable Garden

This time of year, there's probably not much to do outside in your garden, but it is a great time of year to do some planning ahead! A garden planner is very helpful if you want to set up your vegetable garden in the most efficient and attractive way. You will be able to harvest many more delicious vegetables for your kitchen if you have taken some time to plan your garden before you start.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is not a one-size-fits-all vegetable garden planner because every garden is a little different. Your soil type, climate and the amounts of sun, shade and shelter in your garden will all play a part in determining which are the best vegetables for you to grow and where to locate them in your garden. However, you can use the hints and tips in this article to construct your own vegetable garden planner.

If you are planting vegetables within a bigger garden that also contains flowering plants and trees, then you can simply pick a good place for each vegetable according to whether they like sun or shade, etc..

On the other hand, if you have a dedicated vegetable plot, there are some points to consider when you are deciding on its location, as well as the location of individual plants within it. Most vegetables like to have quite a bit of sunlight but not necessarily to be in constant full sun.

Many plants require a lot of water in order to grow big, healthy vegetable crops, so one principle of your vegetable garden planner might be to site your plot near to a faucet or water source. If you do not have a faucet near your garden, you could grow your vegetables in a place that can be reached by a hose from your kitchen window - or install a rain barrel or tank to collect rainwater that you can then use to water your garden in a more sustainable manner.

You can also consider companion planting. This is a system of planting vegetables beside others that are mutually supportive. It may seem weird that plants can support each other, but they do, usually by repelling certain pests. The best known example is the 'three sisters': squash, maize and climbing beans. There are many other examples too, such as the allium family (onions, garlic, leeks) with the nightshade family (tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplant), the brassica family (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower) and carrots.

Square foot gardening is a popular option for many new vegetable gardens. This usually involves raised or ground-level beds of 4 ft width, divided into one foot squares, with a different vegetable in each square. Depending on the size of the plant, some plants will need a whole square for each, and others will happily grow two, four or more to a square foot. Having the beds only 4 ft wide allows you to reach everything. If you want a bigger vegetable garden, it is best to create paths between beds so that you have good access to your plants for weeding, harvesting and other tasks.

Do not forget to rotate the vegetables in your garden. This is essential for preventing many diseases from becoming established. For example if you always grow tomatoes in the same place, the fungal and other diseases that tend to attack tomatoes will gradually gain in strength over the years until they become a real problem in that spot. By keeping track of where everything is planted in your vegetable garden planner each year, and moving crops from one spot to another every year, you can prevent this.