Happy 1st Birthday, GrowVeg.com!

Friday, November 07, 2008 by Jeremy Dore - Categories: Gardening, planning, GrowVeg.com
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GrowVeg.com has just turned one year old.  During the first year we have made some significant improvements, listened to our customers requests for features they’d like to see and been working away in the background to make it the best website on the Internet for kitchen gardeners.  So, how did it all begin and where are we headed?

Rolling back the clock to 2005, I had been into vegetable gardening for a number of years.  Two summers previously my wife and I dug up our front lawn and converted it into a good sized vegetable plot.  We figured that our children wanted to use the back garden for playing (which already had vegetable borders and a greenhouse) and there was little point in keeping a well-trimmed lawn at the front when we wanted that growing space!

At the same time many of my friends were getting into home growing – often because they wanted fresh organic produce at low cost, or liked the idea of becoming a little less supermarket dependent.  It wasn’t long before several of them were giving up though.  Like us they led busy lives, balancing demanding jobs with wanting to spend as much time as possible with their children, plus the crops they were trying to grow didn’t always work out.  I began to see that some very simple factors were at play: spacing plants correctly, rotating crops, seeing how to grow them without having to wade through masses of information.  What was needed was a way to pull all that information together in an easy-to-access way.

So the idea of GrowVeg.com was born: an online garden planning tool that would take the effort out of planning a successful vegetable garden or plot.  I have worked in IT for many years and love programming so it was a natural step for me to start conceptualising how the planning process could be made easier.  Top of the list was presenting the information visually, so that it became intuitive to see the spacing and plant families for each crop.  I started writing the software to make it happen, enlisting the help of local vegetable gardeners to review the ideas and point out where there was room for improvement.

It wasn’t all plain sailing.  Early on we discovered that another website was just launching with similar aims: PlanGarden.com.  My first reaction was to give up – it seemed to be aimed at exactly the same solutions I had set out to produce.  Plan Garden is well produced software and the site owner, Roy Stahl, works hard to continually improve the service he offers.  But it became apparent to me that there were significant differences in what we were doing and I wanted GrowVeg.com to become more of a visual design tool, rather than a diary-like planner.  Sometimes it takes a good competitor to help you see what is unique in your own ideas.   We enlisted the help of a fantastic design agency (Ampersand) and a great team of garden experts and pushed on.

So in November last year we officially launched and by early Spring were getting press coverage and lots of positive feedback from our users.  Over the year we had many requests for new features, many of which have been added and plenty of others are coming.  The range of vegetables in our planning tool was expanded almost double, including many more herbs and fruit than we had previously included.  We worked hard to make the system more adaptable to different locations, introducing different plants and growing information for the UK and US, together with adaptable frost dates so that the planting calendars are tailored to each person’s location.  One worry for a young start-up company like ours is the possibility of a big internet player coming in, stealing the idea and putting us out of business.  So we also filed a US patent for the unique features of our planning tool – the best way to protect our users who trust us to keep their garden plans and information for many years to come.

Where are we going from here?  Well, there are so many great improvements we still want to make to our central product – the garden planning tool.  We actively encourage all our users to contact us with suggestions, noting each down and using it to shape our vision for the future.  We want to make the tool more flexible, more powerful, more efficient and so simple that it’s natural to use.  Quite a tall order but I’m very excited about what we are doing here.   I hope that’s why a small company like ours is the best placed to produce a website like GrowVeg.com: we believe passionately in our product and in helping our customers.  If I was asked where I want to be on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th birthdays I would say the same.  If we can still be providing a great service and believing in what we do, helping more people succeed in growing their own healthy organic food, then GrowVeg.com will be a success.