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Computers in gardening
The one thing that would persuade me to buy a tablet computer is if my favourite book, "The A - Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants" was available on a computer. In a searchable database form it would be an absolute must have. As a book it is too big to carry around. There must be many more heavy reference works that would benefit from this treatment but it is just not happening. If I had this work at my fingertips I would never buy another unsuitable plant for my garden because I could look it up first to see how tasty it was for slugs and whether it was hardy enough to survive at 1000ft in the Lancashire pennines.
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Information on most plants is easily available online - just put it into Google and choose the most appropriate source of information.
You can always narrow your search by using specific search terms e.g. "salvia amistad hardy?" comes up with the Hayloft site with lots of cultural information including that it is not reliably hardy below -5C http://www.hayloft-plants.co.uk/Salvia/Amistad-1-young-plant/prod5023.html
I frequently use my iPhone at the garden centre to find just such information.
You don't need the A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants to be available online to get the information you need.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Perhaps I should have said "or one of those smart phones". Thank you for the suggestion. I am just not used to thinking in this way.
I think what would be useful is an app or other software that linked garden design with plant selection. There would be a demand for it if it was developed with input from gardeners.
I'm thinking something that would combine the ability to sketch out a design in 3D and input the location of the garden/allotment. The software would then calculate shade, planting times, sowing times, flowering/harvest times, drawn from a large database of plants based on location and aspect of the garden.
Currently the information is all there either on the web or from books but it is a case of looking up every individual plant or groups of plants. It would be convenient if instead the software gave a list of suitable choices based on the gardeners' requirements.
This would be a step forward in my mind to what we have already.
I certainly don't mind searching the web to find information about a new to me plant, and still enjoy a book in my hand now and again, but bringing the vast amount information together with a design tool would seem very doable with the technology available today.
Really, Seedy? Go into your university library, onto the OPAC, try and find a reference work, something like that one or a heavier academic work and you'll find a substantial number of the results are an "electronic resource". There are loads of electronic reference databases of plants, their habitats, their pests and diseases, regional flora. Many are public domain on the web from which print edition encyclopaedias are collated. Many of the databases preceded the web by years.
ITIS, Plantlist, USDA Plants, GRIN, Catalogue of Life, Epic (Kew), RGBE, loads of different ones at UC Davis, the NCBI.
Horticulturists once they've accumulated much of the minutiae tend to just look at genus, epithet, familia & origo, like you'll see on the specimen labels at botanical gardens.
A major problem in data integration i.e bringing disparate data together, collating a 3rd database from two others is that databases are frequently heterogeneous. They have different schemas and data format, particularly where data is embedded in unstructured narrative text, so there would be numerous ontologies to resolve.
A simple example of ontology is where one taxonomical database has fields Domain regnum, phylum classis, ordo etc and the other has a schema of kingdom phylym class, order.
An everyday example of ontologiy and the data integration would be resolving the cultural blurb from seed packets from different producers to the appropriate database fields with the data from within a piece of narrative.
Autumn King 2 is a large, popular, late maturing carrot producing good-sized, cylindrical, red-cored roots of extra fine quality. A heavy cropper that's good for storing too. RHS Award of Garden Merit winner. Sow thinly direct into finely raked, moist, warm, weed-free soil at a depth of 13mm (½") in rows about 30cm (12") apart. Carefully thin the seedlings by degrees to 50-75mm (2-3") between plants. Carrots grow best in a sunny position in well cultivated soil which has not recently been manured. Lift surplus roots in September/October and store in a shed or garage, packed in sand. Sowing - Cropping: 22-26 weeks.
Cordon
An outstanding cordon cherry tomato for glasshouse or outdoor culture. Tomato ‘Sungold’ has an exceptionally high sugar content, that easily rivals ‘Gardeners Delight’, making its attractive, golden-orange fruit irresistibly sweet and juicy. The high yields of delicious fruit (each approximately 13g) are ideal for salads or as a tasty snack. This popular variety also has good resistance to tobacco mosaic virus and fusarium wilt. Height: 200cm (79"). Spread: 50cm (20").Companion planting: Try growing tomatoes with French marigolds to deter whitefly, and basil, chives or mint to deter aphids and other pests.
So how would one have a computer read these texts, find where the data is within those texts, extract each piece of data and attribute it to the correct field in a database? With great difficulty and much natural language processing (NLP) expertise.
Much of humanity's corpus of knowledge isn't actually in structured datasets. Our observations and tips on this forum for example aren't in a structured format, nor could they be, .
There are user input websites which accumulate entries and attempt to structuralise growers' experience of plants, much in the way of a citizen science project. One such is Myfolia.com I've used it to fill in my personal plant database when sparse or archaic imperial data has been supplied.
How to you come to buy unsuitable plants? Do you buy them or seeds online without checking if they are suitable for the context you want them? Do you buy them at a garden centre without asking the nurserymen?
There are aftermarket landsca
Oh, it cut off some of my waffle. Sorry too much coffee while thinking aloud again.
Gemma, there are 3rd party aftermarket landscaping tools and GIS tools on Autodesk exchange if you are using AutoCAD.
You can metatag objects in Acad with a database, but I'm not sure how to do it since R9 over 20 years ago. I can't find anything in Acad 2015. I don't do anything creative concerning the garden with it I just drop blocks of the rows of veg where they've been planted and annotate with the date and only .
What Dove said.
Seedy, get a smartphone and talk to Google (a huge database) and be pretty specific in your search terms. And at the same time contact the publishers of your book and see if there's a kindle edition (which you can have on your smartphone too) which is searchable too.
Gemma I think there are some fairly good apps for garden design, garden management and gardening solutions on google play, you may need a couple of apps to cover your needs, but hey we are talking free apps.
Great responses. I like the way GemmaJF builds on the initial thought. What a project that would be. But as Frank Davidson says very difficult. However, I have been a somewhat casual and impulsive buyer at garden centres and just wanted something that would help me to be more discerning from an independent and authoritative source. People selling plants have given me assurance about hardiness that has been wrong. Also, plants a re not labelled with "Slugs love this plant". I can see that I need to get a lot more serious in pre-planning of my purchases, and a lot less casual. I have checked with the A-Z publishers and they have no plans to produce an e-book version. Perhaps they think like Frank, that it is all available on the web anyway. I think there is a market in the middle consisting of people who are older like me and less competent in internet searching and still "book" minded. Thank you Frank for the search suggestions. I will follow them up.
I have checked out Frank's suggestions and I don't think they meet my need. They lean towards the scientific rather than the more basic practical issues and it takes too long to get to the information I would want when using them. For example, some decisions are very much yes or no. Do slugs eat them? Is the plant hardy to -15øC? Can they tolerate partial shade? What is the flowering period? How tall will it grow?
I come back to my favourite book. It's a pity it is so heavy and won't fit in my pocket because its information is so easy to access.
https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/Search-Form would seem to be pretty close to ideal for you. Much as I enjoy browsing through the A-Z it is very handy to do a quick check via the web.
What we really need is every plant on sale to carry a scannable label that carries all the information about its needs, likes, dislikes etc and for every gardener to be able to afford a smart phone to read it.