Rekindled

MyFolia.com is my absolute favourite gardening website.  It is basically an online gardening journal, with Web 2.0 bells and whistles like plant wikis and social networking groups.  I use it to keep a record of what I am doing in my garden, and I find it is much easier to keep track of everything than using a traditional pen and paper journal.  You can use it to keep track of any type of garden, whether indoor or outdoor, vegetable or ornamental, massive or tiny.

What I like best about it is that you can use it to keep track of individual plantings of each type of plant.  I can create a new planting of the same type of plant e.g. the sugar snap peas I planted 3 weeks ago as well as the ones I planted yesterday.  This will help me to get  a steady crop through the summer rather than having 10 boxes of tomatoes that I can’t possibly use up all in one go!

You can also keep a  journal of what you have been doing in the garden and cross-reference this with all your different plantings.  By keeping a record of information like when I plant a seed, when it germinates, when it flowers etc, I am learning a lot about what works and what doesn’t work.  I can then look back at this information next year so I that I don’t make the same mistakes over and over again.  You can see all of my journals and plantings in my profile (if you’re interested).

Another nifty thing about it is that it links to your existing online photo album (like flickr, blogger or picasa) so that you can simply link to your pictures, rather than having to upload them all over again.  I like to take lots of photos of my garden and my plants as they are growing so I find this really handy.  You can also add your seed stash and create new plantings from the same seed, so you don’t have to type in the same information more than once.  Another time saver!

I haven’t really made much use of the social networking aspects yet, but you have access to tons of information.  For each variety of plant there is a wiki (which means the information on it has been contributed by other users of the site, and you can contribute too) which tells you information such as how to grow it, where and when to sow it, how big it will be when fully grown, and so on.  There are also groups where you can discuss many different aspects of gardening and get answers to your gardening questions.

If you are a gardener and you find that you forget useful pieces of information like when you planted your potatoes or what on earth you planted over there, then you will quite probably find myfolia to be a total blessing.  I know I certainly do.