Planning a garden can get pretty complicated. That is exactly why grove exists, because back then we found it really complicated too, with books, cross tables and paper. grove already helps you a lot with the plant filters and by showing companions and crop rotation.
But now a bit of magic comes into play: the Garden Fairy.
She looks at a single bed or even your whole garden, ideally picks up your well-kept wishlist and does in seconds what takes hours of puzzling by hand. If there is already something in the bed, she looks for matching companion crops and for anything that could still go in before or after. So she fills the gaps and makes use of your space. If the bed or the garden is still empty, she first places the large main crops and builds further plantings around them.
Want to use green manure? She can help there too. She plans it for you based on the crops of the past year and the crops already planned for the new one. What she watches most closely here is crop rotation, so that legumes don’t follow each other, for example.
The nice part: none of it is set in stone. The suggestions first appear only as a preview on the bed. You can look at them in peace, change them one by one and only then accept them. Whatever you don’t like, you discard.
Two jobs: vegetables and green manure
The fairy can do two things for you. Which one, you choose right at the start in the dialogue under “What should the Garden Fairy do for you?”:
- Plan vegetables: the fairy plants empty beds, fills gaps in beds you have already planned and uses free periods for pre-crops and follow-on crops. This is about the harvest.
- Green manure: the fairy sows plants you don’t harvest but return to the soil. They improve the earth, collect nitrogen, loosen the subsoil or hold nutrients in the bed over winter.
The other options are described in the chapters “Planning vegetables” and “Green manure”.
Starting the Garden Fairy
You can call the fairy in two places: for a single bed or for several beds at once. In both cases you first choose the job in the dialogue and then set the matching options.
A single bed
Use this when you are working on one particular bed.
- Open the bed.
- Click Garden Fairy in the bar at the top (the purple wand icon).
- Choose the job, set the options and click Get started.
Several beds at once
This version plans across your whole garden.
- Go to “Beds” in the navigation.
- Click Garden Fairy. This starts selection mode, and to begin with all beds are ticked.
- Tick or untick the beds the fairy should work on. Clicking a bed tile toggles the selection.
- Click Start at the top (the purple play icon), choose the job, set the options and confirm.
- The fairy works through the beds one after another. You can cancel a run at any time; it then stops after the current bed.
When planning vegetables, the fairy spreads your wishlist across all selected beds. That is the real strength of this version.
Viewing, changing and accepting suggestions
Whatever the job, and whether it is one bed or several: the fairy never writes anything down straight away.
- Preview on the bed. The suggestions appear dashed and in violet right in the bed plan. So you see immediately what would go where.
- Change them one by one. You can click any suggestion and adjust it like a normal planting, or delete individual ones.
- Accept or discard. If everything fits, you click Apply. The suggestions then turn into real plantings, along with all the tasks that belong to them. With Discard you delete all suggestions in one go.
After a run across several beds, each bed tile shows you how many suggestions are waiting there and which plants are suggested. You can open each bed separately, check it, change it and accept it. Or finish centrally in the overview with Accept all or Discard all.
As long as suggestions are open they stay, even if you briefly do other things in grove. You should not close or restart the app or the website though.
Notes from the fairy
If the fairy can’t find room for a plant from your wishlist, she doesn’t keep quiet about it. The Notes button shows you which plant she skipped and why: a bad predecessor or successor, bad companions, an unsuitable row type, too little space or an unsuitable planting time. Often it also says which main crop she chose instead.
Planning vegetables
This job is about the harvest. Think of the fairy as an experienced gardener walking through the garden with you, saying: “something could still go here.” She covers three typical situations:
- Planting an empty bed. Depending on the size of the bed, the fairy sets one or more main crops and arranges matching companion crops around them. Or she looks for suitable plants based on the row type in the systems by Gertrud Franck and Familie Langerhorst.
- Filling gaps in a planned bed. If there are already plantings, the fairy looks for matching companions that still fit into the gaps.
- Using free periods. If a bed is only planted in May, early crops like spinach, lamb’s lettuce or winter purslane can grow before that. Or winter cress after the harvest. The fairy finds pre-crops and follow-on crops like these and suggests them.
What she always watches:
- Companions. She doesn’t put bad companions next to each other and prefers good ones.
- Crop rotation. She avoids bad predecessors and successors and takes into account what stood in the bed in previous years and what you have already planned for the years to come.
- Planting times. Every plant only ends up where it fits the calendar.
- Your wishlist. If you keep a wishlist, the fairy works through it first.
The wishlist
Planning vegetables works without a wishlist too. But with a well-kept wishlist the fairy works far more precisely, because then she knows which plants you actually want in the garden. You’ll find it in the navigation under Wishlist.
For the fairy it makes a difference which version you keep the list in:
- Simple: you only say which plants you want. The fairy prefers the ones that have no place in the garden yet.
- With quantity: you also give a quantity, say six lettuces. The fairy spreads the outstanding amount across your beds until the need is covered.
How to set up the list, copy it from last year and filter by it is described in the wishlist guide.
Settings for planning vegetables
Before the fairy gets going you can set a few things in the dialogue. The defaults suit most cases, so you don’t have to change anything.
- Plant main crop in the centre. In row companion planting the main crops usually stand in the middle of the bed, with the companion crops to the left and right. Turn this off and the fairy places the main crops more towards the left. This setting only applies to beds with free row companion planting.
- Randomness. This brings variety into the suggestions. At the far left the fairy suggests the same plants on every run. The further you turn the slider up, the more likely she is to try something different. That way you can compare several runs and pick the suggestion you like best.
- Row spacing and Plant spacing. Here you allow the fairy to go slightly below the recommended spacing. The further you turn the slider up, the closer the plants move together and the more fits into the bed. On beds with fixed rows following Gertrud Franck and Familie Langerhorst the row spacing is fixed and can’t be changed.
Tips for good results
- Keep your wishlist up to date. That is the biggest lever for suggestions that hit the mark.
- Keep your previous years current. The better the history of your beds is kept, the cleaner the fairy plans the crop rotation.
- Try the randomness. Let the fairy run two or three times and compare the suggestions. Often a later run is the nicer one.
- Large main crops need space. If a large plant stands in the middle of a bed, there is little room next to it while it grows. Sometimes you can move the existing planting a bit towards the edge, then something else is more likely to fit beside it.
Green manure
Green manure is the single most effective thing you can do to improve your soil. You sow plants you don’t harvest but return to the soil. Legumes like clover and vetch collect nitrogen from the air with their roots, deep-rooting plants loosen compacted earth, and a closed plant cover protects the soil from drying out, silting up and leaching. The most important principle behind it: the soil should never be bare.
Unlike with vegetables, the fairy plans green manure across the area, not in individual rows. It is broadcast, often as a mixture of several species on the same area. Among themselves, green manure plants don’t need to keep any spacing.
Choosing the right method
Green manure differs above all in when it grows and how it ends. You choose one of four methods, and after that only plants that fit in terms of timing and winter hardiness come into question.
- Autumn, frost-killed: You sow after the harvest in late summer or autumn. The plants are killed by frost in winter and stay as a protective mulch layer. In spring the soil is available again straight away. Typical examples are phacelia, buckwheat, yellow mustard and common vetch.
- Autumn, overwintering: Also sown after the harvest, but the plants are hardy and stand through the whole winter. In spring you cut them down and work them in. This keeps nutrients in the soil over winter, and living roots protect the earth. Typical examples are winter rye, hairy vetch and crimson clover.
- Spring, pre-culture: Sown in spring, with a short growing period. It grows before the main crop goes into the bed and is cut down and worked in beforehand. Good for a quick portion of green matter ahead of the summer plants.
- Year-round, fallow: A whole season of green manure in a year when a bed would otherwise rest. This is the most thorough cure for exhausted soils, often with perennial species like clover or lucerne.
What matters to you
Green manure plants can do very different things: one collects nitrogen, another loosens the soil deep down, a third drives out nematodes. So that the fairy picks the right species for your soil, you tell her what matters to you.
To do that you sort a list of properties by dragging the handle. Whatever is at the top is most important to you:
- Gather nitrogen. Legumes enrich the soil with nitrogen that the next crop feeds on. Good ahead of heavy feeders like cabbage or tomatoes.
- Loosen the soil deeply. Deep-rooting plants break through compaction and leave root channels for water and air.
- Fight nematodes. Some species push back or fight harmful nematodes in the soil.
- Suppress weeds. Fast-growing, densely covering species leave weeds no chance.
- Support bees and insects. Flowering green manure like phacelia is valuable forage for bees.
- Bind nutrients. Some species catch dissolved nutrients and keep them from leaching away over winter.
Two examples: if your soil is exhausted, you pull “Gather nitrogen” and “Loosen the soil deeply” to the top. If nematodes are troubling you, put “Fight nematodes” in first place.
How many species? The mixture
It often makes sense to sow more than one green manure plant and mix several instead. Different species combine their strengths: a legume delivers nitrogen, a deep-rooting plant loosens, a grass builds plenty of root mass. If one species fails, the others step in.
With the Species per area slider you set an upper limit for how many species may go onto one area. If the fairy finds only one genuinely suitable species, she prefers to sow that one rather than padding the mixture out with an unsuitable one. The more species you allow, the more varied the mixture, but the more seed and effort you need.
Regions on large beds
On large, continuous beds the fairy can divide the area into several regions and sow its own plant or mixture in each one. There is a solid reason for that: it makes crop rotation easier to keep to. On one side you can sow brassicas, for example, and legumes on the other, without them getting in each other’s way.
You control this with the Form sections on large beds switch. Small beds get the same mixture across the whole area anyway, so splitting them up isn’t worth it.
Crop rotation with green manure
Green manure belongs in the crop rotation too. The most common mistake is choosing a green manure from the same plant family as the crop before or after it. Brassicas like yellow mustard or oil radish before or after cabbage can encourage clubroot, and legumes directly before beans or peas lead to soil fatigue or clover rot.
The fairy takes this into account automatically. She rates every green manure by what stood in the bed before, what comes after and what grows next to it in the same period. She clearly avoids bad predecessors, successors and companions, and very bad ones almost entirely. So if there is still a bush bean in the bed, she won’t suggest vetch next to it. For this to work well, well-kept previous years help, just as with vegetables.
How green manure is shown
On beds with row companion planting, plantings are created every few rows. This is meant to represent a broadcast sowing.
Tips for good green manure
- Never leave the soil bare. Whenever a bed or part of it becomes free, green manure is worth it, even if only for a few weeks.
- Legumes pay off ahead of heavy feeders. If cabbage, tomatoes or squash are coming next year, pull “Gather nitrogen” to the top.
- When in doubt, phacelia. It isn’t related to any vegetable family, so it fits into any crop rotation, flowers for the bees and germinates reliably.
By the way, green manure is not carried over into the new year during the year change. It depends on the crop rotation and is best recalculated by the fairy every year.