Garden Planter

Summary

Garden Planter is a gardening app that allows users to plan their garden by dragging and dropping plants into rectangular beds on a fixed grid. Available for Android, iOS, and the web.

It includes detailed information about different plant varieties and provides helpful growing details, such as watering and temperature tolerance, for each plant. It also has a feature that indicates whether two plants can grow well together by displaying a red or green mark. In addition, Garden Planter allows users to customize the size of the grid cells based on the specific needs of each plant, and to set frost dates to help with planning. The app's user interfase is clear and user-friendly, with custom icons and plant pictures to help users easily navigate the app.

Company: Percula LLC

Note: Web app currently only Beta version

Differences

PermaplanT is a gardening app that offers more variety via permaculture planning, which is not available in Garden Planter. PermaplanT also includes more complex input parameters, such as soil type, shade, and wet/dry conditions, to provide more accurate results for companion/antagonist. In summary, PermaplanT has more features than Garden Planter and should lead to more diverse ecosystems for permaculture gardens.

Title: Smart Gardener

Summary

Smart Gardener is a Web gardening app that allows users to plan their garden by dragging and dropping plants into rectangular, circular, and rotated rectangular beds. It also has a feature that allows users to create and cover certain plants in shade. However, the app has a poorly designed and outdated user interface, and it does not have a feature that indicates whether a plant is a good match for a particular location.

Similarities

Layer activation and visibility (but list of plants etc. is shown somewhere else).

Differences

Smart Gardener does not have many of the functionalities offered by PermaplanT, such as checks to determine whether a plant is well-suited for a particular location based on factors such as sun, soil, companion/antagonist, and time of year. Overall, Smart Gardener does not offer as many functionalities as PermaplanT and is not as comprehensive in its approach to planning and maintaining a permaculture garden.

Veggie Planner

Summary

Veggie Garden Planner is a mobile app that allows users to design their gardens by dragging and dropping plants onto a canvas, without the constraints of a fixed grid. The app provides general information about each plant and indicates the relationship between plants that are placed close together on the canvas. In addition, it displays a tabular overview of the relationships between all of the plants that have been placed on the canvas. However, the app's user experience could be improved, as it requires users to add plants to their list before they can be placed on the canvas.

Differences

Veggie Planner offers more flexibility than other gardening apps, but it is again not as feature-rich as PermaplanT, which includes permaculture planning capabilities in addition to flexible plant placement and dynamic plant relationships.

Fryd

Summary

Fryd is a web, Android, and iOS garden planning app that requires authentication to use. It offers various finished garden plans and allows users to choose the type and size of their garden. Users can also choose the shape of their garden beds and indicate the type of soil and shade in their garden. The app includes features such as undo/redo, zoom, and the ability to add landscape elements such as houses, trees, and bushes. However, through personal experience, it is not quite performant as dragging some elements can show visible delays. In addition, it is not clear whether adding different landscape elements and shading affects the relationship indicator between plants.

Similarities

Zoom with scrolling
Drag&Drop from right window (In PermaplanT windows should be minimizable)
Resize (PermaplanT has indication of width/length and not so big blue handles)
Automatic room consumption of plants
Symbols with connections to indicate good/bad relation between plants (PermaplanT additionally has visual indication for good/bad places)

Differences

In terms of their goals, both apps aim to enable planning for a diverse garden and have similar features. However, the PermaplanT app will have more parameters to customize the garden and landscape, which can indicate a more accurate relationship between different plants. Fryd:

doesn't have proper layers
no copy & paste
ways are covered by beds

In PermaplanT:

plants can be outside of beds -> no rotation of beds needed
concept for menu should be simpler
doesn't have rows of plants (but only areas if chosen by user)
there is no "magic stick"

powerplant

Summary

powerplant is a FLOSS MIT-licensed web app, which is inactive since a few years.

Similarities

technology: react
goals: yield

Differences

focus on offline functionality and less on collaboration
focus on beds
quite different in technology: uses JavaScript instead of TypeScript/Rust

Interesting Ideas

provides an easy to follow schedule for planting, transplanting, and harvesting
gives suggestions which plants should be grown in which environment - location, climate, …
see here for several other even longer inactive projects