I used it last year. The actual layout part where you drop your plants and draw your garden is a little clunky. The idea behind the planning and scheduling features, particularly succession planting, is sound but didn’t match up with my reality. As soon as your weather or location or other factors steer your towards longer or short days to maturity the whole schedule is thrown off.
All the planning in the world won’t mean much when your calendar tells you it’s time for more carrots and the last ones have just sprouted. So then you’re either putting in a second crop of carrots late or maybe substituting radishes and now you need to update the planner. To me it was a fun tool in the winter months to determine spacing and sizing and layout. In the summer it just made me constantly feel behind, off-schedule, and a little stressed. I’m also just not good at following strict plans. I like to change my mind on spacing or layout in the moment based on what I’m observing. So planning before hand and changing it after was a waste of time.
That’s just my
experience and it’s probably a great tool for some people. I did enjoy spending many snowy winter afternoons planning away on the garden in that program while sipping cocoa. I just don’t think the benefit was much more for me than playing garden on the computer.
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