Isyour habit of watching Fear the Walking Dead got you brushing up on your survivalist skills? Or maybe recent talks of nuclear weapons has you wondering if you could survive a global catastrophe on your own —which, if you refer to the Doomsday Clock, could happen pretty soon.
Knowing how to tend a self-sufficient garden is an important skill to have, whether or not a zombie apocalypse or nuclear winter is in our future. If you plan on discovering your green thumb this summer, don’t leave your S8 Plus inside.
Next to your spade and sprinkler, it’s the greatest tool a gardener can keep in their shed—and it’s one of the few that can fit in your back pocket, too! Before you take to your pots or plot, make sure you keep your phone handy and equipped with the following apps.
Gardening Manager
Did you know that corn, squash, and beans are considered the 3 sisters of gardening? You would if you had Gardening Manager on your phone. It’s an indispensable resource when you’re just starting out, and it can inform you about the best conditions, planting times, and arrangements to help your garden flourish. Its features also include to do lists, diary-like notes, and photo support that help you identify plants.
Plant Diary
If you’re waffling between using your bullet journal to plan your garden or your phone, Plant Diary offers a low-tech alternative that can help even the most amateur techie. It’s pretty straightforward, with few bells or whistles to distract you from getting the job done. The app helps you map out your garden so you never forget where you planted your flowers, veg, or fruit. It also keeps tabs on your garden’s growth, health, and cost, with built-in alarms and notifications for watering and other maintenance tasks.
Leafsnap
While this won’t necessarily help you care for the herbs and vegetables you’ve planted this year, it can help quench your curiosity for the plants that you encounter off the homestead.For anyone who has wasted hours trying to track down a plant you’ve seen by description only, this will be a huge time saver. If you’re ever unsure of a plant’s name, Leafsnap is your electronic field guide. It’s incredibly easy to use, as the app synchs with your handset’s camera. All you have to do is take a pic of the leaf or flower in question, and the app will be able to pinpoint its genus.
Garden Compass
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to use Garden Compass. Reality, however, sometimes necessitates its place on your phone. This app helps you identify the pests and diseases threatening your crops. Performing in much the same way as Leafsnap, you’ll use your camera to take a pic of encroaching weeds, bugs, or damage and submit it to a panel of roughly 50 experts. One of them will tell you what’s going wrong with your plot. Garden Compass also comes with a care calendar that reminds you when to water or fertilize plants.
In between pruning, weeding, and fertilizing, you’ll find that your hands are a little dirty. When you plan on updating your diary or identifying a new weed encroaching on your plot, you can’t exactly wait until you’ve scrubbed your nails free of dirt. If you expect to use your phone like the garden tool that it is, make sure you have a vinyl skin wrapped around your Galaxy S8 Plus before you swipe and tap away.
The amateur gardeners and tech protection professionals at dbrand understand garden conditions aren’t always sunshine and roses. Between mud, slugs, and bone meal, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t want near your precious phone. That’s why they’ve created skins for iPhones, Androids, and plenty of other handsets that are grime- and water-resistant and easy to clean.
Safety isn’t their only priority. With exclusive rights to trendy 3M vinyl textures, S8 Plus skins from dbrand offer unique and fashionable wraps for your handset. Order a Galaxy skin for your device to discover the dbrand difference and keep your phone safe from the earth.
It may be dirty, and it may be a lot of work, but through trial and error, these apps can help you unleash your inner horticulturist. Download the above apps and any others that catch your eye on the Play Store to help create a self-sufficient garden this year. With a little bit of a determination and access to Wi-Fi, we’re willing to bet you’ll be harvesting a huge yield of tomatoes come this fall. So many, in fact, that you’ll be looking for ways to get rid of them!
