

You create a garden using the simple, uncluttered interface, then add plants from an index of 50 vegetable types and 500 varieties. This is great for garden geeks more interested in obsessively tracking every aspect of the growing season than designing a plot. IVEGGIEGARDEN for iPhone and iPad ($9.99) You can also save plants you like and upload your pictures to create an album of favorites. Department of Agriculture zone, water requirements, color, height and width. Unlike many reference apps, it allows you to search by category, common name, scientific name, sun exposure, U.S. This app has no design capabilities, but it's a handy reference tool with information on a variety of plants, including trees, shrubs, annuals, perennials, vegetables and herbs - about 20,000 varieties in all, most with accompanying images.
LANDSCAPERS COMPANION ANDROID
LANDSCAPER'S COMPANION for iPhone and iPad and Android devices ($5.99) And when you've finished designing your yard or indulging in a little dreamscaping, you can e-mail results to friends. You can also change the color palette of the graphics, which recall architectural renderings, to suit your mood. Five starter templates can be manipulated in myriad ways to suit your tastes and imagination: add and subtract shrubbery, trees, water features, pathways, lounge furniture, fire pits, compost bins and even laundry lines. While Garden Tracker is limited to rectangular plots, Home Outside allows you to create intricate and varied landscapes. There is a great lunar-phase feature, in case you like to garden in sync with the moon. And a handy reference list of garden pests helps identify troubling bugs and blight, with advice on eradicating them. Registers for recording a variety of information (the date you planted seeds or seedlings, when you last watered and fertilized, your anticipated harvest date and which plants did best) allow the app to function as a garden logbook. It also gives general care information, including watering needs, ideal soil temperature and planting depth, and tells which plants are incompatible - say, pole beans and cabbage. The program tells you how many of your chosen plants each square foot of your garden will accommodate. Click inside each box and choose the crop you'll plant there from a list of about 65 plants typically found in kitchen gardens.
LANDSCAPERS COMPANION SERIES
This app allows you to design rectangular gardens of up to 2,500 square feet: Enter the desired number of rows and columns to create a grid with a series of boxes, each representing a square foot. GARDEN TRACKER for iPad ($3.99) and iPhone (99 cents) Here are 10 of the freshest picks for iOS and Android devices.
LANDSCAPERS COMPANION FREE
The apps range in price from free to about $10 - although a higher price doesn't guarantee a better or more sophisticated program. But an ever-rising number of gardening apps might change that attitude by helping with tasks like designing plots and choosing crops, and perhaps improving yields. Many gardeners may prefer digging in the dirt to fiddling with a mobile device.
