How Does Your Garden Grow?
This is the season of buds and blooms, strolls and hikes and “what’s that doing in my garden?” These are some of the top-rated gardening apps out there for 2022, offering a cornucopia of information about plants, pests and how to deal with them all. These are free (with occasional additional services at a charge) and offer various ways to skill up your gardening game. We’ll also feature some new garden gadgets that caught our eye this year.
Plant ID Apps
• PlantSnap sounds like “Snapchat,” and that’s by design. The two apps are partners in offering users the ability to identify more than 600,000 plants in over 30 languages. Their goal is to ID every plant species on the planet.
• Planta gets more in the dirt about gardening in its plant identifier app, offering customized tips around specific plants, like how often to water and notifying you when to fertilize, mist or find more light.
• Leafsnap If foliage is your jam, Leafsnap will fill your dance card. Experts from Columbia University, The University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Institution joined forces to develop this high-tech AI app to identify plants based only on photos of their leaves.
• GardenAnswers Looking for what’s cutting line and dining on your garden before you and yours get a chance? This app fingers the villains in your garden and tells you how to deal with pests and disease as well as ID’ing plants.
• iNaturalist If you’d like gardening to be more of a social event, iNaturalist is a community of more than a million scientists and naturalists that connects users who offer up their answers to your questions about plants. And they will use your observations. “We share your findings with scientific data repositories like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility to help scientists find and use your data. All you have to do is observe.”
• Plantix For the budding farmers out there, Plantix helps diagnose problems, includes ag experts to answer questions and schools you on best farming practices — it even offers a fertilizer calculator.
Gardening Gadgets
From across the pond comes a spunky-looking little grass munching robot. There are three price points for the Gardena, to fit various lawn sizes, and it sports its own Bluetooth app. It gets high points for quiet and reliability. See how it works below.
The Chemical-Free Weed Killer from Sharper Image kills weeds effectively with infrared light. It uses concentrated light to target and kill weeds at the root level, cutting off the water supply from the root, while ultraviolet light penetrates the ground to disrupt root functions, without damaging surrounding plants or grass.
