The Virtual Gardener Has Arrived

A new innovative website planning website has been launched aimed at the growing number of gardeners who are growing their own fruit and vegetables.

GrowVeg.com takes the headache out of planning your vegetable plot by enabling you to create personalised interactive garden designs. Previously gardeners have had to consult books and re-work complicated plans to ensure that vegetables from different crop families were spaced correctly and ‘rotated’ to different parts of the garden each year. This prevents build up of disease and the depletion of nutrients in the soil.

GrowVeg.com provides all this information visually, making the process simple and enjoyable. It will even e-mail you to remind you when to sow and plant out the crops you are growing this year!

Each vegetable on the plan has a coloured circle around it indicating both the space it requires and the plant family it belongs to. By dragging out a row of plants they are automatically spaced correctly and the website calculates how many of each variety you should plant for maximum growth. The colour-coding shows which vegetables you should grow together and which you should keep apart.

The website even remembers where you have previously planted different vegetables over the past five years. When planning your garden for the next season it shows you where to let the soil rest and which vegetables need to be moved to a different place. Areas to avoid for a particular crop family flash in red to indicate that you should choose somewhere else.

GrowVeg.com has been in development for two years and features a highly-effective user-friendly interface. It was designed with both the amateur and more serious gardener in mind. Despite its simplicity of use it contains features that will make it a valuable time-saving tool for gardeners of all levels.

In addition to the interactive Garden Planning Tool, the site has a number of ‘GrowGuide’ articles on everything from keeping your plants pest-free to gardening with children. The ‘GrowBlog’ section contains topical news and comments for budding kitchen gardeners, with new content added regularly.

GrowVeg.com offers a free 30-day trial of the Garden Planning Tool together with all the features of the site so it’s worth logging on and checking it out for yourself – www.growveg.com