✿✿✿ Master Gardener's Buddy ✿✿✿
The first app that lets you share your garden and your gardening lore. Really share.

Gardeners map their gardens for a number of reasons:
❀ to plan what they will plant
❀ to record what they have planted before they forget
❀ to make a to-do list of what to thin and prune and fertilize and ...
❀ to make a hit list of what plants have to go

And of course the ability to go back at any time and add information, comments and other data to the their planting points.

Gardeners have a wide variety of information that they might like to keep for a given planting, or "PlantPoint":
❀ Latin and common names of plant they have planted.
❀ any photos they might have of the plant
❀ other documents that might be important to that plant
❀ free description
❀ whether the PlantPoint describes a plant that is to be planted, has been planted, needs work, or needs pulling.
❀ lots of other topic fields (temperature tolerance, watering, fertilization ... )

GARDEN LAYOUT
This app is for mapping your garden. Since the iPad is rectangular, it uses rectangular jpegs named in a special way for upload via iTunes to map your garden. Not all gardens are square, so simply draw the shape of your garden on a piece of paper and scan it in to a jpeg, or use a graphics software to produce a garden layout jpeg. Upload that through iTunes to the app. Repeat with a layout of every garden you have - perhaps your planting beds need layouts all to themselves.

GARDENING DAY
Once the layouts are in the app, make a new garden folder, make a new garden layout folder using one of the maps you have uploaded, and then when it is gardening day (either in the arm chair in winter or outside in sunny weather) make a new gardening day just like turning to a new page in a garden journal. Look through the planting record layers and if you decide that you would like to enter the Latin & common names of a number of species to appear automatically in the PlantPoint tag, just upload text files with those names and they will appear for you, saving you typing them in each time you plant. Names can also be stored directly on the app for easy access. While you are at it, you might want to upload jpegs and other files relevant to a plant point. Multiple plantings? Multiple PlantPoints.

When you create your new planting day, you can choose the planting layer on the pop-up legend, and then enter PlantPoints in the layer of your choice. PlantPoints in each layer have a distinctive icon to decorate your garden layout. Each PlantPoint planted pops up a three tab data entry form. The first tab shows you the gardener, the tag (usually the name of the plant), a description box, and a choice of flags (to plant (neutral), planted (green checkmark), to do (yellow checkmark). The second tab displays four distinct renameable fields, (say, Light Req, Water req, colour, Fert req). The third tab is a place to check mark uploaded documents (photos, pdfs, etc.) to keep them associated with that PlantPoint.

Afraid your garden layout will get too crowded? You can display based on the flags for five display choices.

SHARING YOUR GARDEN
Once you are finished, you probably wish to e-mail the results. There are many reasons for exporting, and Master Gardener's Buddy tries to accommodate these by providing multiple export formats.