Do you walk through Farmer’s Markets thinking about your own backyard, wishing you had made time last spring to plant your favorite crops? Think it is too late to plant a garden? Think again. Because you live in the city, where it’s much warmer than the countryside, you still have time to plant an autumn garden that will keep giving deep into Mother Nature’s colder months. And it turns out, there is an app for that! The new version of Garden Bilder for iPad, created by Indianapolis-based Beefsteak Software and released in the Apple App store this week, includes tools for planning your autumn garden and connecting with Indy’s gardening community. And its free!
Garden Bilder is a powerful garden simulator and social networking platform that enables you to create the perfect urban garden. Select from a detailed database of over 1,700 varieties of edible fruits, vegetables, herbs, nut trees, and grains. Then let Garden Bilder predict yield and help you prepare your dream garden.
The real power of this app is networking: find, follow, and friend gardeners in your community. Garden Bilder’s ‘Dashboard’ serves as a home screen that allows users to post photos of their garden and talk about what they grow. Users can see on a map other Garden Bilder users nearby and chat with them, making it possible to share knowledge and even trade excess harvest. Garden Bilder’s privacy settings allow users to control how much of their information is public and who they communicate with.
The new version also includes landscape elements (patios, ponds, fences, and decks), companion planting information, and exciting new garden templates (including an autumn garden and a super foods garden).
Beefsteak Software was awarded the top prize for Garden Bilder at Techpoint’s Entrepreneur Bootcamp, presented by Ice Miller, in Fishers, Indiana in July. In June, Garden Bilder also won the People’s Choice Award at the 59 Days of Code software completion in Fresno, California.
Versions of Garden Bilder for the iPad and iPhone are available for free from the App store. If you have an iPad, visit the App store or search for ‘Garden Bilder’.
