I have a habit of picking up hobbies, getting obsessed with them for a while, then moving on to the next thing. A couple of years ago it was knitting, right now it’s web apps.
The Seed of an Idea
Gardening, though, is one of the hobbies that’s stuck, and I’m still at it many years on. I don’t grow vast quantities of anything, but I like to have a go at most things just to see how they go, and home grown definitely tastes best.
I garden in containers, mainly. Ever since I For the last few years, I’ve spent the first week or two of each vegetable growing season trying to figure out what I should plant in which pots to reuse the compost the “right” way, and wishing that there was a nice friendly little app I could refer to that would tell me: “oh, your old carrot trough? you should stick some tomatoes or potatoes in there this year” and the like.
Well – at the moment I’m in a “when hobbies collide” zone, and decided that while I’m on a web app buzz, I’d go ahead and write the damned app since noone else seemed to be doing it.
How it Works
The app gives you two options: tell it what you grew last year and it’ll recommend what you can grow in the same spot this year, or tell it what you want to grow and it’ll recommend where you should plant based on last year’s planting.
The current version works on a common 5 year rotation. My research indicates that there’s more than one, so it may not match what you’re already doing. If you’re nosy, you can take a look at the page’s code and figure out what the original 4 year rotation was before I updated to a 5 year one, and see how they differ.
Note: If you want to skip a vegetable category, you can select one of the recommended crops and plug it back into the app to skip forward or back a stage. For example, if I want to grow broccoli and the app recommends I plant it where I had legumes last, but I haven’t planted any legumes, I can select “beans” as the crop I’d like to plant instead and see what would have been planted in the same spot 2 stages ago, then stick my broccoli there instead.
Credit where Credit is Due
To allow iThing users to download the web app, store it on their device and use it natively, I used Google’s Mobile Bookmark Bubble. Considerably less hassle than going through the iTunes submission process.
To refresh my poor tired mind on things HTML and javascript, www.w3schools.com was of great value.
