GrowVeg.com Press Information
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (14th September 2010)
Designer Kitchen Gardens
Kitchen gardening has been growing at a phenomenal rate over the past few years. Many people are discovering that planning and planting a kitchen garden is a rewarding and satisfying experience. Families value it as a way to help their children make healthy eating choices and enjoy the outdoors. Lengthy waiting lists for allotments are evidence of the resurgence of interest in growing your own fresh food – a trend that seems to have been boosted by the recession and celebrity-chef endorsements of sourcing fresh produce.
However, just as with ornamental gardening, there are also busy people who would prefer to enlist the services of a garden professional to plan, plant or manage their vegetable garden. To fill this need a new breed of garden companies are springing up – the 'managed service' industry of edible gardening – and it's a huge growth area.
Take QuickCrop for example (www.QuickCrop.ie). Based in Ireland, they combine nursery, garden design and maintenance services into easy 'Planted Garden' packages that can be bought online. For €395 they will supply, build and install a 6x3ft raised vegetable garden that is guaranteed to succeed. Customers can choose to have the design customized and can add on services such as maintenance or supply of extra plants. It is a great partnership because customers will often return for more plants in following years.
In America many garden designers are likewise discovering a new opportunity to use their skills to help people reconnect with the land. GroOrganic (www.GroOrganic.com), based in California, supply ready-made vegetable gardens, consulting and maintenance services. They are seeing such rapid growth that they are franchising their concept across the country.
What is particularly attractive to these new companies is the sustainability of the business model. Installed vegetable beds are the perfect basis for an on-going business relationship with the customer. Some people will want a complete package with the beds planted and maintained. Others may enjoy the gardening themselves but, encouraged by the success of these highly-productive gardens, will then decide to expand to more raised beds and a wider variety of plants such as fruit trees and bushes. Customer referral rates are high and it's easy to see why they are thriving.
Managing hundreds of vegetable gardens does introduce its own challenges though. Customers often expect a premium advice service for these bought-in vegetable gardens. With each garden different and the need to manage and rotate crops from year to year, it can easily turn into an organizational headache. Many are turning to online garden planning software such as GrowVeg.com which has just added management features to its highly acclaimed Garden Planner software.
Garden designers can now choose a 'master account' on GrowVeg.com which enables them to create and manage garden plans for each of their customers. Their customers can then receive their own personalized plan of the vegetable garden which helps them visualize the garden that will be installed and request any changes. The system can then send twice-monthly emails detailing the vegetables that need to be sown or planted for their garden design along with growing tips and articles to help them along the way.
Quickcrop Director Niall Mc Allister says "Through my experience the better planned the gardener the greater the results. The Growveg.com Garden Planner has been invaluable to the customers we have done installations for. It also has the added advantage of the customer taking control of their patch so any phone calls with queries tend to be more constructive."
Garden Planner subscriptions are available at significant discounts to garden design companies to add as a premium service for their customers. It solves the problem of helping each customer achieve success with their new vegetable garden whilst making it easy for the designer to manage hundreds of individual vegetable gardens from year to year.
Further details are available at www.growveg.com/subscribebulk.aspx.
ENDS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (16th April 2010)
The Leading Online Garden Planner Just Got Better
Growing a vegetable garden just got even easier with the new version of GrowVeg.com's highly-acclaimed Garden Planner software.
Growing your own vegetables is not always as easy as people imagine. Not only do plants have to be spaced correctly but to achieve the best results they should be 'rotated' to different places each year to prevent the depletion of nutrients in the soil and build up of pests. The online Garden Planner at GrowVeg.com makes this simple with its unique color-coded system showing the spacing and plant family for each crop. The software remembers where plants were located in previous years and advises on where they should be placed the following year.
The new version further extends GrowVeg.com's position as the best planner available. Some of the many new features are:
- Succession Planting: the software makes it easy to get more than one crop from a single area of ground, maximizing the harvest
- Track Varieties: system can track different varieties of plants which users can customize
- Garden Journal: gardeners can add notes on how each plant performed to learn from mistakes and successes
- Intuitive Interface: rows and blocks of plants can easily be added and vegetable beds can be copied and pasted to new locations
- Built-in Tutorials: within the software show how to use the many powerful features
The Garden Planner adapts to locations around the world and gives recommended planting dates, together with a detailed list of how many plants will fit into the area. In addition, it sends out personalized email reminders twice a month of what to plant in the garden from the current year's plans.
With all these features it is easy to see why GrowVeg.com has rapidly grown to become the world's most popular online vegetable garden planner with well over 30,000 people using it to plan their gardens.
GrowVeg.com offer a free 30-day trial of the Garden Planner- for details just visit www.GrowVeg.com.
ENDS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (28th March 2009)
Vegetable Gardening Made Easy
Garden planning specialists GrowVeg.com have just launched a series of online guides to growing fruit, vegetables and herbs in your own garden.
More and more people are experiencing the thrill of growing their own fresh produce yet the specialist knowledge required to succeed at this can be daunting. Not only do different vegetables need sowing and planting at specific times but they also need spacing correctly, planting in the correct position and protecting from pests. The techniques vary from plant to plant and just knowing when to feed or harvest them can often save your whole crop from spoiling.
To make the process simple, GrowVeg.com have created a series of free online ‘GrowGuides’ listing all the important information for more than 80 fruit, vegetables and herbs from their extensive database. Each plant contains a full listing of all the vital factors that enable it to be grown successfully together with information on troubleshooting and harvesting.
As well as the plant information, gardeners can add their own growing tips and advice. The thousands of people who use GrowVeg.com will be using this to build up a repository of all the shared gardening knowledge about each crop along with helpful ways to grow them.
To complement this there are a series of GrowGuide articles written by gardening experts. These cover topics such as Controlling Pests, Starting a New Plot and Gardening with Children.
The new GrowGuides can also work in conjunction with GrowVeg.com’s unique Garden Planning Tool which is used by gardeners to organise their vegetable plots. This online software makes it simple to create plans, print customised planting calendars and rotate crops from year to year. Gardeners can opt to receive email reminders of when to sow and plant each of their vegetables and these link directly to the GrowGuide plant pages. Getting organised in the garden has never been so easy!
GrowVeg.com’s GrowGuides can be found at www.GrowVeg.com/growguides.aspx
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (10th October 2008)
New Website Takes the Guesswork Out of Planning Your Vegetable Garden
Media Contact: Randy Schultz (505) 822-8222, Email: schultz (at) schultzpr.com
Planning a vegetable garden just got easier with a newly launched website for backyard gardeners. GrowVeg.com uses innovative online features to help both novice and experienced gardeners create the perfect plan for a bountiful vegetable and fruit garden.
In the past, dedicated gardeners sketched out proposed garden plans after consulting seed packets and reference books to ensure that plants were spaced correctly and vegetables from different crop families were rotated to different parts of the garden. (Those new to gardening probably didn’t realize that crops should be rotated to prevent disease and to prevent the depletion of nutrients in the soil.) The Garden Planning Tool on GrowVeg.com provides this information visually as you plan your garden, making the process both enjoyable and foolproof.
The first step in the design process on GrowVeg.com is to create a scale diagram of your garden space using the easy-to-use drawing tools. Then simply click on a plant icon from the toolbar and add it into your garden. Each vegetable is represented on the plan with a colored circle that indicates both the space it requires in the garden and the plant family to which it belongs. Dragging out a row of plants automatically spaces them correctly, and the website calculates how many of each variety should be planted for maximum plant health and harvest.
Each vegetable icon in the toolbar also has an information button. Click on it for a complete description of the plant’s growing requirements, harvesting tips, and more. The color of the info button identifies the plant family. The Brassica family, for example, (broccoli, cabbage, kale) is green.
GrowVeg.com makes plant rotation a snap. The site remembers where you have planted different vegetables during the past five years and alerts you when you try to place the same vegetable (or one from the same family) in that garden spot. Areas to avoid for a particular crop flash red to indicate that you should select another location in your garden.
After your garden design is complete, GrowVeg.com sends emails to remind you when to sow seeds and put transplants into your garden. Reminders are automatically adjusted to your climate zone: by simply entering your zip code the website looks up your frost dates and calculates the best planting times.
There is much more to the site than the interactive Garden Planning Tool. The GrowGuides section of GrowVeg.com offers lots of helpful gardening information about a variety of topics ranging from natural pest control to companion planting for maximum garden performance. The GrowBlog section contains topical news and comments for backyard gardeners, with new content added regularly.
GrowVeg.com offers a free 30-day trial of the Garden Planning Tool along with all the other features of the site. Visit www.GrowVeg.com to log on and begin planning your next garden.
Photo Caption:
The easy-to-use features on GrowVeg.com make quick work of designing a vegetable garden. Just click on a veggie icon and drag it into the plan. The website automatically spaces the plants correctly so you know exactly how many to plant