Resources

Tools for Garden Planning

Garden Planner from growveg.com

This tool is the best one I've found for edible gardening. It will even let you use the full features on a trial basis but I pay for a subscription so I can keep track of crop rotation and save my plans from previous years.

Garden Puzzle

I like this website for planning flower beds. You place your plants and it will let you see what the landscape will look like in four seasons. It does require a paid subscription to use the four season views and other neat tools, but you can get a fairly good idea if it will work for you with the trial. It also has only an ok selection of flowers, shrubs, and trees but it will let you import your own images to supplement their database. I've found it to be kind of buggy, but I've been putting in tickets to try and get them to fix the issues I've found.

Cornell Bulb/Perennial Study

I love studies! And this one is great because even though it wasn't in my state it is still in zone 5. They took a bunch of bulbs and perennials and planted them together to see what the best combinations were. They took photos at different stages too. I'm using this site to determine what combinations I'm going to use in my new flower bed.

My Plant Database

I'm also a big fan of data. I don't want to have to go to a website to search through someone else's database, I just want the data. So I've been collecting a bunch of data on plants in this spreadsheet. I'll keep updating it as I go and I hope some other geeky gardeners find it useful. Let me know if you think of something I should change.

Iowa Four Inch Soil Temperature

The most important temperature when you plant your garden is the soil temperature. Iowa State University measures the soil temperature and displays the data for the last three days. Very useful when deciding when to plant your spring garden.

Other Gardening Blogs for Zone 5

The Iowa Gardener

A free e-newsletter and associated website about gardening in Iowa for Iowa gardeners.

ESCO Garden

Eastern Central Iowa
Blog of the new garden at The ESCO Group