Download mediaOrganic's New Planting Planner

Although we’re in the dead of winter and the blog posts are few and far between, there is a tremendous amount of gardening activity going on behind the scenes at mediaOrganic that, like spring asparagus, is simply awaiting the proper moment to burst forth and be consumed. This month we introduce the new mediaOrganic 2011 Seed Tracker and Planting Planner, a tool we created for ourselves but that we hope our readers too will download and find useful in planning their own gardens.

The mO Planting Planner grew out of a very real need we had to finally corral our heretofore haphazard and reactionary gardening process and mold it into an organized planning process. As with many gardeners, we had become collectors of seed. Every year we would order a few new seeds from the various and tantalizing catalogs that miraculously appear in our mailbox each winter. Not much planning went into these purchases, mostly just our desire to try something new and different.

Of course being small scale suburban gardeners bent on growing a variety of crops, we rarely used the complete contents of any single seed packet in a season. So every year we had leftover seed, and as the years passed, our collection grew. A quick glance at our Current Seed Inventory will give you a good idea of the age and variety of what we have accumulated to date (note the nasturtium seeds dating to 2004!).

As a result of our interest in growing new and different crops our garden has also grown larger and with that, the realization that crop rotation (13 beds) is now more complicated than ever. Throw in the fact that we’re now doing fall plantings and one can see that we’ve moved well beyond the boundary of being able to rely on the human brain (my brain anyway) to keep it all properly sorted.

The mO Seed Tracker and Planting Planner appearing on this web site is built in a Google spreadsheet document and embedded as html; it is the actual document we are using at mediaOrganic . The really neat part is that changes to the spreadsheet document automatically pass through to the embedded html so you can see our updates in real time.

The even neater news is that we have posted an Excel / Open Office compatible version of the spreadsheet to our web server for our readers to download. Our hope is that other gardeners will find ways to improve upon what we’ve started here and share their improvements with the rest of us.