Web innovation for vegetable gardeners

2009-06-26 20:28:18 (GMT) (WiredPRNews.com - Green, Press Releases)

Experienced web users who are tuned into growing their own vegetables will appreciate the ease of use of a newly released food gardening web site at www.cityfoodgrowers.com

‘We use interactive design and a large amount of data about food gardening to help site users very easily tie together often complex information, so they get faster and more relevant answers to their common gardening questions, enabling them to spend more time in their gardens.’ Peter Kearney, founder of Cityfood Growers

At the click of mouse, gardeners from any location in Australia, USA and New Zealand can select by day, month or plant on the 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 of the most common food plants and daily planetary information. The web site allows for localisation of 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.

When a gardener uses the site planting calendar, their search result not only displays if it is ideal to work with a plant on month or day, but also shows which months during the growing period that a gardener should expect extremes or heat or cold, so they can take some precaution in advance to protect their food plants.

Once a gardener decides on the appropriate plants work with, they can access a large resource of information on each plant, as well as gardening tips. Easy to use online tools make it very fast for gardeners to answer their common questions with searches on over 30 key plant attributes, for example: soil and planting requirements, ease of growing, space needed, container growing, yield per space, water requirements, organic treatment of all pests and diseases for each plant, companion planting, rotation requirements and beneficial flowers. The site access fee is a once only payment of A$40.

Cityfood Growers is a based in Brisbane, Australia and released the first version of its web site in May 2008 for Australian users. The new release of the site in June 2009 opens the web site to food gardeners from any country of the world. It creates a new standard with ease of access to knowledge on improving the productivity of food gardens.

Peter Kearney, www.cityfoodgrowers.com