What software do you use for garden planning/record keeping?

No -these were horizontal. Still looking....

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/835468/

Finally! Bless Google's little pointed head!!

Thank you!

WOW! I have read this entire thread and all I can see is you people intimidate the heck out of me. I feel so stupid and as much as I would love to be as tech savvy as you all I will have to stick to my spiral bound notebook and a pencil drawing of my garden.

Geez, wish I was this smart.

((hold on Susan -there are those among us in WELL over our heads!!))

No kidding! Over my head but trying to figure it out. At this point I have two garden plans: one in Photoshop Elements and one in GIMP. Not sure which I like better. I don't know that either will work for more than a plan to print out and write on, though. I can't see myself making little text boxes for tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and peas to move around on the plan as I rotate my crops from year to year.

Leslie

Do you have to have Mozilla to use the reminder fox? Last computer I downloaded Mozilla on it caused all sorts of problems, crashing, slowed down everything.

I looked at the groveg and it is cool . But I cant pay to subscribe and I agree with youa ll that I want access to it. Why don't one of you brains design a copy cat program like that for all your DG buddies?

{{{green---at least she's not talking to us, right?? Wthex and Grrrl and Indy can handle it maybe....running scared here!!!}}}

Grownut, I dunno what you're talkin' about. Me, I ain't seen nuthin'!

WTHEX!!!!! GRRRRRRL!!!! HARRY!!!!! Help!

*snort*

Susan -I was waiting for THEM to figure it out!! Lolol.

sounds good to me. I am patient.

Ah, well, yes, knowing how to use programs and writing programs are 2 VERY different things. Not my bag, I'm afraid.

As for Mozilla, I've used Firefox for a long time on Windblows and Linux, and my SO has on various flavors of Unix and Macintosh and we've never had those kind of problems. It had great features way sooner than other browsers. And much more secure than Internet Exploder ;~)

Sandy

I use mostly Safari, being on a Mac, but I do use Firefox occasionally; some sites do better with it. Never had any problems with either. I don't use IE because of security problems.

Writing programs definitely is a whole 'nuther ball of wax than understanding how to use them. Just putting up a couple of websites was persnickety enough for me, thank you very much! Computers are so darned concrete about everything, and there's no room for fudging or errors when you're writing in html. I'm sure programming is a million times worse.

Leslie

susandonb1141, you can use ReminderFox with Firefox. I think in fact it's designed for it. I use it with SeaMonkey, which it works with fine also. It's really a big help to me in keeping track of what to start when. I combine it with the graphic outlines of my beds and two html files where I list everything I am going to plant this year in alphabetical order and with growing info, and then another where I list all the veggies and how much of each and how to preserve them best, etc. Yes, it sounds complicated, but it has made my planting way less complicated, like I said. After the year when I ended up with a couple thousand seedlings and no idea where to put them all, I started using the computer to keep track of everything.

"Windblows"....."Internet Exploder".... HA HA HA... wait... HA HA HA!

Ok - I'm better now. :)

Been a little busy at work so I haven't been on the forum much. I'm not sure what the issue is, but I'm not really a graphics person and I couldn't draw a stick man if threatened.

I've used and configured a lot of software, with the exception of graphics and Mac, and would be happy to help but the little that I have used Adobe and GIMP make me an admirer and not an expert.

Don't know that much about Windows setup starting with Vista. Although my wife has Vista on her laptop and I do muddle through the issues on that system for her I can't answer off the top of my head on Vista issues. Otherwise if I don't know I generally know where to find the answers.

Ugh, I've heard bad things about Vista, I only just moved up to XP (b/c I got a new graphics card that requires it).

Yep, I can configure and compile 'em, maybe even play with a little python script, but no coding.

Oops, i've hijacked the thread again. Any more Gimp help needed, let me know.

That wasn't highjacking, Sandy; I think that was totally on-topic. I haven't had a chance to play with GIMP for the last few days so no more questions, but I will know who to ask should I have more. Thanks!

Okay, Sandy, I can get the rectangular box that the text is in to rotate, but the text stays stubbornly horizontal. What's up - any idea? My rotate tool is in a different spot than yours; it's second from the right third row down. But it says "rotate" when I do a mouseover, and it rotates the box, just not the letters therein!

Leslie

Did you try flattening the image first?

Per Sandy's instructions, I didn't flatten it at first, but when that didn't work I tried flattening the image and then selecting the textbox with the magic wand to manipulate it. Neither allowed me to rotate the actual text although I could move it from one spot to another.

Here's what I've got with Photoshop Elements, although I don't think I can create movable tags for varieties, like tomatoes and peas, so that I can play around with rotations and layouts on the computer. I can always do that after I print it out, though:

This message was edited Feb 24, 2009 9:41 AM

That's a nice layout. I'm jealous--you have fruit trees. You can put this image on an html page and then put tags on using image maps. That's what I was planning to do. I finally finished all my plotting. Whew! Now I need to the soil to unfreeze.

Thanks, Harry! We don't get a lot from our fruit trees but they're young yet. Across the fence from the little orchard is a whole full sized orchard and the chicken yard, but nothing much came from that one. I think the southern NJ climate is inhospitable to orcharding without pesticides and fungicides. With the new little orchard we figured we could keep a better eye on it and also provide water. We'll see.

Hmmmm... put it on an html page and then put tags? I'm not sure I know how to do that. Can you then slide them around?

Leslie

Looks good greenhouse_gal.

you guys are killin' me!!! I have to stop reading this thread, it just brings all my intelligence insecurities to the surface. I did get hooked up with Reminder Fox though, it is pretty cool.

Thanks, wthex. I've printed it out and am playing around with where to put my veggies and melons this year, but as you can see the sizes are odd. I wish I had six or seven equal-sized sections for rotation! Here's a better image of the plan, with the rulers:

What's Reminder Fox, Susan? Sounds like you've got enough on your hands already with your blueberry plants and greenhouse and such! I've got a small 8x8 Rion greenhouse but I don't use it as much as I could; I'm not really sure how to extend the season. I've thought about using cold frames, too. Anyway, I wouldn't get too insecure about your intelligence if I were you. There aren't enough hours in the day to be an expert in everything!

Leslie

I was thinking you could use an image map, but then you would need to create a page for each spot on the image that you wanted to pop up. You could do it with a rollover effect, which would be easier--each time you ran your cursor over the image, a new image would replace it, and you could have that image contain all the information about that plant, like when to start it, how best to harvest it, etc. But I was actually thinking of a hover menu, and that requires Dreamweaver
CS3, which I was messing around with a little while ago before I decided it just wasn't a good idea for me to use (talk about a learning curve). I think you know what I mean--you put your cursor over something and stuff pops out of it. That would be a good way to show info on an image that was located on an html page. It's overkill. There has to be an easier way to compress that information. I'm just not thinking of it right now.

You're looking for a way to include much more information in your plan than I am. Your description reminds me of a website I saw for a family-oriented farm vacation setup in France; when you did a mouseover of a location on their map, information popped up about activities associated with it. It was the cleverest thing I'd seen in a long time.

All I'd like to do is be able to move, for example, the word "beans" from one row to another, and replace it with "tomatoes" or "salsify" or whatever I'm planning to grow in that spot that year. Doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but since I have to have a printed copy anyway for record-keeping and to use as a guide in the garden, I can just write my veggies and varieties in, I guess!

Leslie

Hi Leslie,
When you say the rectangular box the text is in, do you mean the colored box you've drawn or the textbox immediately surrounding the text after you first add it?
If you've got a bunch of text boxes (=layers), it may be easier to keep the little layers dialog open. Now, to find it...click on Windows>Dockable Dialogs>Layers. That gives you a little dialog box showing all your layers. Each text label shows as a layer. When you want to move or rotate a text label, click on it in the box and it will be selected as a layer. Then you should be able to use the Rotate and Move tools on it; just check the bottom of the toolbax to make sure the "layer" button is selected next to "Transform:", and click right on the text to select it so you move the right layer.
I think when you flattened it and used the magic wand, you clicked on the colored rectangle, right? The problem is the magic wand is selecting all the surrounding pixels of the same color as the one you clicked on and the text is a different color. To select the colored box and the text at the same time, use the rectangle select tool if the rectangle hasn't been angled or the lasso tool if it has.
Hope this cleared things up a bit
Sandy

That would work like a peach if I hadn't gone and flattened everything. But now I know. That makes it much easier! Thanks!

I'll have to try that, Sandy. That makes sense, and thanks so much! I still don't know why it didn't work before I flattened it, though!

I'm not sure if I have the dockable dialogs option; it may be a little different on my Mac. I do have a history which I was using, but it's a little hard to see what's going on in those tiny pictures.

Leslie

wonderful thread and info!! i would have laminated and pinned my garden to a wall ages ago. And used up several whiteboard markers, lol!!

Looks nice, greenhouse. I envy your fruit trees as well. And you did this in Elements, or GIMP? If you did it in Elements, you could add tiny photos of your plants as markers. And you could look up your land on Google Maps, take a screen shot, and use that as the base of your drawing. It looks great as it is, though. I need to improve my Elements skills for photo editing - it's on my to-do list - ha!

I'm trying to resist spending a lot of time playing around with a lot of different programs and just get it done. Not going well. I spent a bunch of time in Google SketchUp. It'd be so cool to be able to use that really well. I did some stuff in the free trial of SmartDraw, which is perfect for this, but I can't come up with the 200 bucks right now for that sort of thing.

Susan, you're smart enough to use any of these programs, so don't feel intimidated. It's just a matter of having the right resources to learn them, and taking the time to learn the ins and outs. And most of us are pretty busy, so we have to pick and choose what we learn and what we set aside for another time. My tech friends are generally pretty cool, but sometimes I ask them a question and they say, "You really don't know that?!" No, I don't spend all weekend at my computer. And by the way, what do you know about growing your own food? Silence.

Do you have a program already installed on your computer that you'd like to know more about using? Maybe we could give you some pointers.

The plan I posted is from Elements. Hadn't thought of doing a screenshot from Google Earth; I only got broadband recently so my dialup was too slow to use it. Wouldn't the resolution be fairly poor, though, if I had to blow it up that much?

I could use anything as markers, but could I slide them around from year to year to reflect changes in plant locations for rotation? That seems to be the sticking point.

I use Photoshop a lot, both to prepare photos for painting from them, which sometimes includes combining elements from different photos, and to fix photos of my paintings so they do a good job of showing what the picture really looks like.

Leslie

Yeah, the resolution probably wouldn't be that great. Just throwing out an idear, there.

Elements is great. I use the Straighten tool a lot. Other tools, too, but I really like that one.

I use the sharpen tool a lot, and levels, to bring up color and crispness.

I just downloaded the latest Google Earth and was trying to explore a little French town we stayed in, but I can't figure out how to turn corners in a streetscape. Maybe you can't?

Leslie

I haven't installed Google Earth. I just use Google Maps for now. http://maps.google.com/ Just type in a location, click Street View, and click the arrows through the streets.

Looks like there are some tutorials for Google Earth here: http://earth.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=17090

It still won't go down the street I want to check out! I guess it has no images for that area. Thanks, though!

Leslie

Oh, if the line/arrow doesn't point down the street, it isn't mapped. Sorry. I forgot about that.

Aha, I thought that might be it. It creates a dream-like atmosphere where you're so close but can't quite get there! Weird!