The foundation of the bed planner

Today I want to give you a look inside our work. I’d love to jump straight into the companion planting bed plan, but first I should tell you something about the foundation of our bed planner. So in this post I’m starting with the plant database.

Plant database

When we started programming in spring 2019, we quickly realised that a professional bed planner needs a huge amount of information about plants. And not just in text form, but in a proper database that allows the right kinds of queries and functions. So we began building a database covering the following areas:

Numbers, data, facts

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For the bed plan, information like row spacing and plant spacing is the most important data to start with. But if you think a bit further – say, to a calendar of upcoming tasks – then things like indoor-sowing lead time and growing period become important too. Once you get up from the computer and actually start sowing, details like sowing depth, germination temperature and whether a variety needs light or dark to germinate become interesting. So we decided to store a lot of information in the numbers, data and facts section, as you can see in the image.

Timing

An important factor in our bed planner is the use of pre-crops and follow-on crops, since you often grow more than one plant per year in a given spot. Our plant database therefore contains one or more planting windows for each species, with direct sowing, indoor-sowing and transplanting periods as well as the expected harvest window.

Good companions

Good companions is probably one of the most important concepts in companion planting. So for each species we record its good and poor neighbours. If there’s something specific worth mentioning – such as that a certain white butterfly is attracted – Claudia notes it down. We use the companion data in the bed planner to help you choose plants and to warn you when something doesn’t work well together.

Predecessors and successors

In ‘classical’ companion planting, crop rotation in the first year isn’t so critical. For the bed planner based on Gertrud Franck (which will be the second planner, following the row companion planting one), crop rotation is needed from the very start of planning. From the second year onwards, however, crop rotation matters on every bed – and we already display this in the bed plan. Not just for the previous year, but depending on the species, going back up to seven years.

Data and texts

As you may have gathered, our plant database isn’t just about the data we use for calculations – it’s also meant to be a comprehensive reference. So Claudia writes descriptive texts for each plant. It’s also often hard to put soft, flowing information about plants into ‘hard’ numbers that a program can work with. An informative text helps there too. Whether all the texts will be ready at launch we don’t know yet – the data comes first.

Species or varieties?

Since the most important data is often very similar across individual varieties, we decided to maintain the plant information at species level. Where varieties do differ significantly, we go into more detail in the text. Varieties might be added in a later version, but this way we have more time to cover more species first. Our database currently contains 140 species, and Claudia is busy entering the data for them.

Filters

That might sound a bit technical, but I want to show you what you can do with the data and a few filters.

Finding out how well two plants get on as neighbours in a cross-reference table is straightforward. But when you need to find a good companion for two or three plants you’ve already planned – ideally one that’s also a good successor to last year’s crop and is finished before the winter onions go in – that gets a lot harder.