This week, App Smart was all about gardening because spring has sprung, or is about to. There are many apps that can help you in the garden, like plant reference guides or advice about garden bugs, and even apps that can help you manage your garden and its plants over time.
A useful reference is the free Android app Garden Plants Growing Guide. Unlike some of its peers, this app is a little pedestrian in design because of its plain lists of plants and simple pages full of text. But it contains an impressive database of flowers, vegetables and herbs â€" with more of an emphasis on flowers â€" and each entry has a photo and detailed advice on when to sow a plant and how to take care of it. You’ll have to know the Latin name for many of the flowers, though, because that is how the app lists them and there are no thumbnail photos in the flowers list to help identify them.
Fruit Garden is a slightly similar $0.99 Android and $1.99 iOS app with a focus on fruit plants. It’s a list of common varieties, with details on each to help you understand how to best plant and grow them. The app lacks useful extras like garden management facilities, and its list of plants is not exhaustive. But it has taught me how to better feed the orange trees in my garden.
The Gardening Guide is a much more detailed app that has lots of advice about planting and tending your garden. It’s aimed more at vegetable gardening than flower gardening, but each entry is well written and has comprehensive advice on each crop. For example, I learned that it’s a good idea to harvest lettuce in the morning, after the leaves have plumped with water overnight. It’s listed as The Gardening Guide From Mother Earth News on iTunes, and as Garden Guide in Google’s app store.
If you’re planning a bit of a spring garden redesign, the aptly named Garden Design Ideas, free on Android, may help. It’s a large list of photos of gardens, with no extra details or data on plants and so on because it’s all about a garden’s visuals. It shows all sorts of gardens, like modern ones or Japanese-style ones. This app is fairly simple, but it may frustrate you if you fixate on a particular design and want to know more about it.
Quick call
Pandora, one of the hottest music streaming apps out there, is finally available as a free Windows Phone 8 app â€" and as a sweetener, the app has no ads and no monthly streaming limit through the rest of this year.
