When we created our first bed plan by hand, the most time-consuming part was: Who goes with whom and when? First the research into good neighbours, then in the following year the question of crop rotation. We pored over many tables, browsed through books, and spent a great deal of time doing so. We want to spare you that effort with the filters in grove.
You open the filter dialog with the “Filter” button – in the plant list straight from the main menu, but also while you are editing a bed.
When you are looking for plants for a bed, the “Suggested filters” feature is a good shortcut, so you don’t have to keep opening the filter dialog.
Neighbours
Finding a good neighbour in a classic companion planting table is usually not that difficult. But what if there are already plants on the left and right of your bed, and you’re looking for a suitable addition right in between?
In grove you can select multiple plants in the “Good neighbours for” filter field. For example: Broccoli is planned for the left side of the bed, tomato for the right. Select both plants, and grove shows you which plants would fit well between these two.
The list is clearly organised into expandable groups:
- Broccoli, Tomato: Plants that are good neighbours for both.
- Tomato: Plants that suit tomato and at least do not disturb broccoli.
- Broccoli: Plants that suit broccoli and do not disturb tomato.
- Neutral: All remaining plants that are not bad neighbours for the selected plants.
This gives you an at-a-glance overview of which plants are suitable for that specific spot in your bed.
Successors / Crop Rotation
Grove also takes crop rotation into account, that is, what was growing in the bed before. Suppose you had onions there last year.
Select that in the “Good successors for” field and grove will only show you plants that are also good successors for onions. This usually makes the list considerably shorter. In this example, only a few suitable plants remain, for instance carrots and radicchio.
If this selection feels too restrictive, you can tick “also neutral”. This also shows you plants that are at least not bad successors. Sometimes that is perfectly sufficient and better than an unfavourable combination.
Predecessors / Crop Rotation
Sometimes you are looking for a good predecessor instead, for example when you need an early crop for the spring. That is what the “Good predecessors for” field is for. Select tomato there, for example, and grove will only show you plants that are good predecessors for tomatoes.
There is a tick box here too: “also neutral”. It adds the plants that are at least not bad predecessors to the list.
Gertrud Franck Method
If you garden according to the principles of Gertrud Franck or the Langerhorst family, this filter is relevant for you.
Here the distinction is not only between A, B and C crops. For B crops, a further distinction is made as to whether it is an early or late crop. A plant can also be both, early and late.
As soon as you edit a bed in the corresponding mode, grove automatically offers you these filters in the quick selection.
Timing
The filters “Planting possible until” and “Harvest possible before end of” are especially helpful when you are looking for pre- or follow-on crops within the same year.
Planting possible until June means: You are looking for plants that you can sow or plant by June at the latest, because the preceding crop can be harvested by then.
Harvest possible before end of May means: You are looking for a plant that can be harvested early, because something else is planned for that spot from May onwards.
If you combine these two filters, e.g. to find a plant for a short catch crop, you must factor in the growing period yourself. Just because it is possible to plant a cucumber in June and also harvest cucumbers in June does not mean that they will grow and ripen within a month.
Suggested filters
The filters are already a powerful tool, but one thing bothered me: constantly opening the filter dialog. I place a plant, for example, and then have to go back into the dialog to enter that very plant in the neighbour filter. Yet grove already knows the context when a bed is open, and can guess which filter you need right now. You will find these suggestions in the collapsible “Suggested filters” section.
Wishlist
This section only appears if you actually use the wishlist. You can filter the plant list by plants on the wishlist. Or only by those you haven’t planned on any bed yet. If you use the wishlist with quantities, you can also filter by the plants that are not yet planned, or not planned in sufficient numbers.
Neighbours
This section appears as soon as there is at least one planting on the bed. grove suggests up to three plants for the neighbour filter. If there are already more than three plants on the bed, you can also filter for all of them as good neighbours at once.
The clever part, though: the most recently created plants are always the ones offered for filtering. That makes the process described above very quick.
Culture
This section depends on whether you garden according to the system of Gertrud Franck or the Langerhorst family. There you get a quick selection by A-B-C crops.
For all other bed types, grove offers you the Main crop filter as long as no main crop after Sister Christa Weinrich has been planned yet. After that, the suggestion switches to the Companion crop filter.
Category
These filters are about bringing more variety into your beds. grove suggests plant categories that are not yet represented on the bed.