Free bed planning with a top-down view

It’s available today: free bed planning with a top-down view.

Even during development I knew I’d build this kind of planning too. A top-down view makes particular sense for small raised beds or greenhouse areas – and it gets asked for a lot, including here at home. That it’s ready just three weeks after the first release, though, is something I didn’t expect. The trigger was a question that kept coming up: “Is free planning from above also possible?”

Row companion planting is wonderful, especially following the systems of Gertrud Franck and the Langerhorst family. But not every garden lends itself to that approach, and not everyone wants to use it. Grove offers far more than row companion planting: a comprehensive plant database, powerful filters, task management and a whole range of planning tools. It would be a shame if some of you couldn’t make use of all that just because I was offering “only” row companion planting, or because your garden is laid out differently.

Last week I was genuinely in flow. The coding and the ideas just came. And so I was able to publish the new version today.

What’s new in the top-down view

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In the screenshots you can see the complete grove bed planner in desktop view. For the top-down planning I’ve added a month selector, among other things. You can immediately see which plant is added in which month and when harvesting takes place.

Rows are also calculated in the top-down view. At the same time you’re completely free to position areas wherever you like and to orient them however you choose. Row spacing and in-row spacing can both be adjusted, and the number of plants is calculated automatically.

One of the screenshots shows the companion planting neighbours for a new planting – chard in this example. Onion and carrot are highlighted green as good neighbours; pepper is shown as a poor neighbour. Poor neighbours or crop rotation problems are displayed not just while you’re editing, but permanently in the bed plan.

Another screenshot shows the crop rotation assistance: as soon as a planting is created, grove identifies good and poor predecessors from previous years. These are shown with hatching in the bed plan.

Status: Beta – but already very usable

The new version has been live since today. Free bed planning is marked as Beta for now, as a few features are still missing – for example the print function and the display of the number of seedlings needed in the tasks. The existing functionality is already very comprehensive though, and planning with it is already a real pleasure. So I didn’t want to hold it back from you.