Planting made easy

2009-06-19 04:07:01 (GMT) (WiredPRNews.com - Featured Stories, Green, Press Releases)

WiredPRNews.com - Press Release — With the burgeoning interest of city dwellers in growing their own food, a key challenge of food gardeners has been resolved with a new release of the www.cityfoodgrowers.com organic gardening web site.

At the click of mouse, gardeners from any location in Australia, USA and New Zealand can select by day, month or plant for correct times to plant, cultivate or harvest their food plants. The web site stores temperatures from over 5000 weather monitoring points in those countries, temperature profiles of 130 common food plants and daily planetary information.

Food gardeners will no longer need to use complicated and sometimes inaccurate zonal and regional planting systems. The site localises the garden climate profile down to the level of town and city and even suburb within large cities. This greatly improves the potential for successful planting. For gardeners interested in taking advantage of moon planting and Biodynamic planting data, the web site integrates the often complex planetary information directly into the planting calendar.

When a food gardener starts using the web site, they create a local temperature profile for their garden. The planting calendar will display whether it is ideal to work with a plant on a month or day and will show which months during growing the period where the gardener should expect extremes of heat or cold.

Once a gardener decides on the appropriate plants to work with, they can access a large resource of information on each plant. Easy to use search tools on the web site make it very fast for gardeners to answer their common questions. Over 30 key plant attributes can be easily searched, for example: soil and planting requirements, ease of growing, space needed, container growing, water requirements, organic treatment of all pests and diseases for each plant, companion planting, rotation requirements and beneficial flowers.

The web site also provides a range of community features which are mostly free to access. Cityfood Growers is based in Brisbane, Australia and released the first version of its web site in May 2008 for Australian users. It has backyard gardeners from all states of Australia as web site members and works with schools to integrate the web site into their organic gardening courses. The June 2009 new site release includes many additonal site features and opens the site to gardeners from other countries of the world.

Peter Kearney, founder of Cityfood Growers www.cityfoodgrowers.com