Use this Garden Time Planner app for:

Planning your garden of Burpee plants, looking up planting information, organizing plants by bed, generating a task list, and checking weather. 

 

Who should use this Garden Time Planner app: 

• Beginning gardeners
• Intermediate gardeners
• Advanced gardeners
• Gardeners who lose seed packets immediately after planting, TBH
• Burpee enthusiasts

 

Features of Garden Time Planner:

• Zone-specific information
• Plant-specific how-to videos
• Automated task list
• Reminders

 

Shortcomings of Garden Time Planner:

• Interface is a little clunky
• Limited plant list
• Minimal info about plants
• No garden map feature

 

The Garden Time Planner app boasts:

The Garden Time app from Burpee is the perfect tool to help gardeners know when to sow, transplant and expect to harvest vegetables and herbs specific to their garden region. The app automatically creates a task list to notify the user when their next sow or transplant date arrives. Included within the app is a full database of plants, local weather, and links to how-to gardening videos.

Works best on Android 4.0 devices and above. Runs on Phone and Tablet Devices.

My two cents:

Burpee really did a great job with this app. It’s not as sexy as Scotts My Garden or as Gardenize, but is exactly what it’s advertised to be – just a simple app for helping you to plan which plants you’ll have in your garden, and plan what planting tasks you’ll need to complete on which dates. Though this app offers plant guides, you’ll just find the data that usually available on the back of a seed packet, so “guide” is a pretty loose term here. By far, Burpee’s guides in this app pale in comparison with the similar app from Scotts (“My Garden”). However, the task list in Burpee’s app makes up for the limited information in my opinion.

It offers a long list of plants with basic zone-based planting information, some how-to’s, and weather information. The real pièce de résistance in this app is the task list that it generates for you based on the plants you select for your garden. After a couple minutes of setup, I had a full to-do list for my summer vegetab;e garden. Normally I would juggle excel, google, a farmer’s almanac, a million seed packets, and a notepad to get a planting tasklist put together for the spring, but with this app, I did it in just minutes. (And as for the question about my process – yes, for just a simple backyard gardener, I do tend to get a little carried away.)

The only major complaint that I have is that the app lacks the ability to add new plants to the list. That’s definitely a major bonus of the Gardenize app, which looks like a major competitor to this Burpee app. In this Burpee app, the plant list that you can select from is pre-populated by the app (presumably a catalog of Burpee products), so you’re limited in what you can plan with. Basically, if it’s not a Burpee product, you can’t plan for it to be in your garden. The ability to add your own plants to Burpee’s existing library would make this a major contender for handiest for planning. The From Seed to Spoon app is similar to this app in its limited plant list, but at least Spoon is brand-agnostic. When I plan my back fence garden bed, where I plant some exotic annuals, I expect that I’ll only be able to plan half of my garden using the app… and if I’m going to have to use excel and a notepad anyway, why use the app? 

I will likely continue to plan my vegetable and more traditional gardens using this app, simply for the tasklist feature.

Screenshots and Features: