Gardening App Review: Gardenize

Use this Gardenize app for: 

Entering notes about your garden into your phone.

 

Who should use this Gardenize app:

People with very small gardens

People who like to type on their phone or tablet

People who want very detailed notes on their plants

 

Features of Gardenize:

  • Planner feature
  • Task feature
  • Comprehensive data storage
  • Clean and modern interface

 

Shortcomings of Gardenize:

  • No mapping features
  • You generate the plant list
  • Everything must be entered
  • No location-specific information
  • Time-intensive data entry

 

The Gardenize app boasts:

GARDENIZE IS THE APP FOR YOUR GARDEN. 

In Gardenize you collect information about YOUR plants, YOUR garden areas and YOUR garden activities. 

PLANTS

Use the phone in your mobile phone to take pictures of the plants in your garden, from the time you plant a seed and as times goes by and the seed grows and develops to a full plant. 

Write notes such as scientific name, seeding time, height etc. You can also note in what area you planted your plant

GARDEN AREAS

Take photos of your flower beds, raised beds and green house and name them as you want. 

You can also make notes such as how much light the area gets, what kind of soil you have and how big the area is. You can also make notes in free text. 

DIARY

Connect your plants with a garden area and an activity type such as: “Watered” Roses” in “Flowerbed by the kitchen” Add one or several photos, and write as many notes as you want. 

INSPIRATION

Gardenize is filled with insparation from bloggs and you tube!

SUPPORT: 

If you need help when using Gardenize or if you have suggestions for improvement, please contact as at http://www.gardenize.com or info@gardenize.se. We provide support in Swedish and English.

 

My two cents:

If you need a place to store your information about your garden, Gardenize might be the place to do it. I found this app incredibly time-intensive to use, but if you only have a small garden with a few species / varieties, or if you’ve got the time and determination to manually enter every.single.detail about each of your plants… this might be the app for you. 

The clean interface makes for an easy-to-navigate application, but is deceptively simple in that you expect similar considerations about user-friendliness to exist throughout the application (hint: such expectations will leave you disappointed). This app is basically a digital notebook for you to fill out with details about your garden. Super handy and well laid out, if you don’t have many plants or if you’ve got the time to enter all that information. 

To start using it, I needed to define an “Area”. I started laying out my 4 by 8 raised backyard bed, which I use for squarefoot vegetable and herb gardening. There was some useful information to be entered, like light quality, soil composition (limited options), soil pH, etc. I thought this was cool, and I hadn’t seen anything with this level of detail in Burpee’s planning app nor in the From Seed to Spoon guides.

After entering the details for my first Area, I started adding plants to it. Honestly, I got halfway through adding the first plant and gave up. I know I’ll never have time to set all this up… because I have to do it completely from scratch. I was so excited about the flexibility of this app, but unfortunately, while working in this app, I just kept thinking, “Why is there no library of plants!?” I mean, honestly, even just plant name would be a good start. There are a ton of details that can be entered for each plant. Even though the fields are all very much optional, I actuall want to be able to reference this information at some point, I just don’t want to have to be the one to enter it. (Yes, I’m so very much a millenial in many ways, I know!)

If this app had a plant library like Burpee’s planning app, or like the From Seed to Spoon app, but still contained all of its other features, I would not only use it, I would uninstall the others! Instead, I’ll be uninstalling Gardenize shortly, wishing I had time to manually enter all of the information it wants from me. I’m not sure if I have too many plants, or if

That being said, if I did have the time, persistent, or dedication to enter each of my plants – OR if I only had a small window or porch garden with less than 10 or 20 types of plants, I could definitely see myself using this app happily and for a long time.

If Gardenize and Scotts’ My Garden app had a baby, that would be my favorite app in the world.

Hands down one of the most visually appealing garden apps available.

 

The app does require that you create an account, but it’s quick and simple to do so.

 

Modern features like a setup wizard really set this app apart.

 

The app asks whether you want it to access your location – I found this incredibly considerate! Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to actually do anything with this information once you opt-in. I was expecting some zone-specific information, and was disappointed.

 

You start by entering a new plant, area, or event.

 

When adding a new area, you’ve got some pretty handy info to enter.

 

When entering a plant, the detailed fields are just as handy as the Area options. All of the fields are optional, so you can enter as much or little information about this plant as you want.

 

When entering an activity, you can put in whichever details you want.