Help - the growing areas

Your path to the growing plan:

• 1. Growing areas: Create your growing areas.
• 2. Plants: Select and customize your plants.
• 3. Crop planning: Auto-plan or plan it yourself?

Terms:

• Growing area: Your growing area, e.g. a bed, raised bed, greenhouse, or a clearly defined area.
• Sub-area: A subdivision of a growing area, when you divide a bed into multiple segments.
• Large area: A growing area that is so large that subdividing it into up to 24 sub-areas makes sense.

A large area cannot be added to a group. Currently, it can only be planned with the GrowSimply crop rotation planner.

• Group: A collection of growing areas with or without sub-areas.
• Rotation: The planned annual rotation of crops within a group or sub-areas.
• Crop rotation: The higher-level, multi-year growing sequence for your plants. Rotation is the practical implementation of crop rotation on your sub-areas.
• Planting break: Describes the time in years during which the same plant or plant family should not be grown again on the same growing area/sub-area.

Goal:

The goal is to create plannable growing areas or groups in order to follow crop rotation and observe the required planting breaks.
A simple rule: Number of subdivisions in a growing area or group = longest planting break of your plants + 1.

Example: If you grow lamb's lettuce with a 2-year break and cabbage with a planting break of 5 years in one growing area, you follow the longer break and choose a group/growing area with 6 sub-areas.

Why is that important?

Without sustainable growing methods, microorganisms die off, soils become tired, disease and pest risks increase, and yields decline. Soils in such a condition require a lot of work to restore; in agriculture, pesticides, herbicides, and mineral fertilizers are then often used. To develop and maintain healthy, productive growing areas, careful and well-thought-out vegetable growing planning is necessary.

How it works:

• Define sub-areas: Divide unevenly sized growing areas into similarly sized sub-areas. Split very large growing areas into several smaller ones.

Areas and sub-areas that are roughly the same size are very practical because they later allow evenly high harvest amounts when the vegetable growing plan rotates annually and the plants need to change their location.

• Create growing area: Give each growing area a name and use your own image so it stays clear for all years.
• Your own image: Take the photo as straight-on as possible from the front, from the side where you look at the sub-areas from left to right. This way, the perspective will later match the display in the app.
• Create group: Combine several small growing areas into a group.

Groups can be very useful for several smaller growing areas, for example for three individual areas of 2 m² each, each subdivided into two sub-areas. In that case, you'd have a total of 6 × 1 m². This also applies, of course, to large growing areas with different locations.

• Plannable growing areas are: Growing areas/groups with 3 sub-areas or more.

If you have the option, try to always end up with six sub-areas per growing area or group. This ensures you have suitable growing areas for all plants for all the years to come.

• Paths: When creating or editing your growing area, decide whether paths should be created between the sub-areas. Paths improve access, but reduce the usable growing area. The path width is subtracted from the total width and distributed across the sub-areas.

Sorting function:

• Sort alphabetically by name.
  
  With a click on this button, you can sort your growing area cards alphabetically by name. Clicking again sorts them in reverse alphabetical order. The sorting is not saved permanently.

• Create and save your own sorting:
  
  With a click on this button, you activate manual sorting. Here you can change the order as you like or also determine it by plant species. After saving, your plants are always displayed in this order.