Using IG Pro with the Vegetable garden

[diegartenfrau]

It has been a while since I have visited the forum last.
Over the last half year I have not used the IG Pro with my vegetable garden a lot. Things just got to busy, and to use the IG Pro for planning my vegetable seeding and gardening,  became to big of a chore.
It just takes too much data input and that became too much for me. 
The fact is that the program is written for an ornamental garden, and even I at first thought I could make it work for the vegetable garden, it just takes too much time to set it up. Each year! The operation of a ornamental garden is just very different then from how you operate a vegetable garden. You don't move plants around all the time, you don't have to make a new garden each year for rotations and so you don't have to move all your plants into the new garden, so you can produce the tasks for them.
If one could move many plants at once to the new garden, it would be a bit easier, but unfortunately you can only move one plant at a time. With having more then 400 vegetable seed varieties in my garden it takes too much time to set it all up each year.

After half a year of not using the program, I thought I give it another try.
I had the idea of simplifying the tasks and instead making a task for each vegetable I was going to make tasks by monthly plantings. So for example all plants which need to be seeded indoor in January I add to the task for January. This way at least the program could tell me when to plant things with less data input.
So I made a new garden for this year, then came the realization that to use the task program  I have to have plants in the new garden. I started moving some, but as I was working along I just came to the realization, it is too much. Too much data input, too much set-up each year.....it just takes way too much time. I don't have time for that. And it isn't much fun anymore. When fun turns into drudgery it is time to do something else 

So I am not going to use IG Pro for my vegetable garden anymore.
Instead I am going to use it for my ornamental garden and if George ever comes up with a good working program for vegetable gardens I might use that instead, as long I don't have to be plucking away each year inputting hours of data.

I like to clarify, that I am not saying IG Pro is a bad program, because I think it is a wonderful program, but it is a wonderful program for what it was designed for "Ornamental gardens". I love the IG Pro program, with all it's wonderful little programs inside it offers. There are so many possibilities to keep track of your garden in there. It just takes too much time to make it work for vegetable gardening, that is all.

So, count me in if you come up with a simpler program definitely !

I also like to mention I tried about every vegetable garden software with a free trial out in the last few month and if I have time this week I like to share to you what I liked about the different programs and what I didn't like and also what was missing from them. Because so far what I found was that every program seemed to have some great features, unfortunately the great features were in different programs and was missing in the other ones.

But this is for another day, since it is late and I need to go and relax now

Till later
Isabell

[ideasguy]

Hi Isabel

Thank you for posting such a detailed account of your vegetable gardening.

From a software perspective, vegetable gardening is indeed a very different challenge than ornamental gardening.
I agree that having to move 100's of plants around each year would indeed be a chore - mind you, not many folk would plant so much seed in the first place.

It looks like I'm not going to have time for quite a few months to do an update to cater better for veggy gardening program.
First stage will be to do an upgrade to IG Pro to bring it in line with the new features in Bank Genie Pro (which Ive been working on intensely for this past year, and on and off for 2 years before that)

As for your evaluation of other software, please dont post your results on the forum. It might be confusing to others, and I would be afraid the discussion might mistakenly be construed as being relative to one of my software items.

Instead, please lets deal with that by email. I would very much appreciate the results of your appraisals.

[diegartenfrau]

I will do that George.
Do understand it might be a while, to get back to you since I am soooooo busy right now.
Too many projects, too little time. I am sure you know about all of that yourself.

I still will use some of the program for my vegetable gardening planning.
I was thinking maybe I just move one of each kind of vegetable to the new garden, then instead making a task for each vegetable I group them into vegetables sown at a specific time. Most of the plant care for planting/seeding/harvest I already have in there. Since many vegetables are sown at the same specific time at least it should give me a schedule on when to start them. I also will keep using it to keep track of all the information about each vegetable, print labels etc..... just won't do the intensive data input work.

But I am so looking forward of you writing a vegetable garden program. 

As I said I have been checking out quite a few other programs and noticed almost all are missing key points. Some are mainly fluffy, some are so terribly designed you might as well just use paper and pencil >lol<
Now if you could put all what they are missing into one program, I think you could leave them all in the Dust.

Take Care
Isabell