Thing 19: Hobbies

MyGarden:

"For those with a green thumb or interest in discovering who online might have gardening advice, try MyGarden. This web service and companion mobile apps categorizes itself as the Facebook of gardening. Share what is in your garden, ask for help identifying plants you would like to add (or eliminate), and get useful information for your growing zone."


This seems like a good idea, but time will tell. Aside from my log in, this is what the app looks like once you get it downloaded. After I signed in, I first went to "Plant overview" and began to add the flowers in my gardens. I figured the easiest way to start was to go to "all plants" and add from the existing list.

 

If you are interested, here are the 22 plants that I added:

 

1. Balloon Flower 'Sentimental Blue'
2. Baptisia australis
3. Bee Balm
4. Campunula 'Clips Blue'
5. Cat-mint
6. Columbine
7. Evening primrose
8. Fern
9. Flowering Crabapple
10. Garden Lady's-mantle
11. Hardy Geranium, Cranesbill
12. Lily-of-the-valley
13. Love-in-a-mist
14. Morning Glory 'Heavenly Blue'
15. Oriental Poppy
16. Paeonia lactiflora 'Sarah Bernhardt'
17. Pink
18. Scilla Siberica
19. Shasta Daisy
20. Snapdragon
21. Sweet alyssum
22. Sweet Violet

This is how this displays:

 

This is not all of the plants in my garden, assuming that they all come up/plant well, but I don't see a way to add plants that aren't yet in their list.

That leads to the problem that I did have with this app. It is not especially self explanatory. When I set up my account, I could see from looking at other gardener's profiles that there must be a way to add your photo and biographical information, but I never found it. Instead, I cheated and went to the website and added my info from there. I also noticed that you can add tags about your garden, which again I had to do from the website.

Here's my profile:

 

So, I'm happy to have learned of the existence of www.mygarden.org, but when I use it, I'll do it from the website and not the app, because I want access to all of the features. It does seem to be a unique social network for gardeners though, at least in app form. I've never found another one like it.

Note for gardeners: I think that MyGarden could be improved if users were asked to put more information about their gardens in their profile. Currently it asks for city, country and size of garden. When I was trying to find like-minded gardeners, I was looking for state, zone or region of the country (I know it's an international site, but it would be helpful for U.S. users), and garden conditions, like primarily shade or sun, etc. It just seems practical.