Getting Started

When you've installed the application and run it this is the first screen you will see:

Plant catalogue

The standard installation includes some data. There are some administrative items (which I'll come back to) and some initial plant data - after all, gardening is all about plants!

If you click the 'Plants' button you will see this plant catalogue:

The 'Plant' column lists species and varieties. To show (or hide) the varieties for a species, click the little triangle to the left of the species name.

The plants I've included obviously reflect my preference for vegetable gardening. It is very easy to add or remove plants from this catalogue.

We'll come back to this catalogue later. For now, close the plant catalogue tab by clicking the little x in the tab at the top.

Diary choice

Now click the 'Diary' button in the left hand column. This brings up the Diary choice window:

You use this window to select which parts of the Diary you want to see - you can select time spans, specific types of entries and entries for specific plant species and varieties.

At the moment, of course, the Diary is empty, so let's record some work we've done. The 'New' buttons are a quick way of adding an entry.

Husbandry editor

Click the New button on the 'Husbandry' line (Husbandry entries are essentially life cycle events) and you'll get this window:

I've changed the 'Date' value, this will default to today's date for a new entry. Open the drop down list labelled 'Husbandry class' (click the arrow to its right), scroll down the list and click 'sow':

Now open the Plant species drop down, scroll down the list and select 'tomato' and the Plant variety drop down and select 'gardeners delight':

Finally, open the 'Watch for' drop down and select 'emergence':

Now click the 'Save' button to record the new entry on the database. If you click 'Cancel' nothing will be saved.

On the Diary choice window, click the 'All' button to the left of the Husbandry line:

then click the Fetch button at the bottom. This will show all the Husbandry entries in the Diary:

Well, we can see that we sowed some tomato seeds but we can do better than that. This is what the Comments are for.

Comment editor

You can add comments to pretty much anything and you can add any number of comments. Double click on the (empty) box in the Comment column for our Diary entry and it will open an editor:

Type in some information then press the Enter key on your keyboard:

Of course, we could have put the Comment in when we first created the diary entry; I'll show you this shortly. For now, close down the application (click the Close button or click the Close item in the File menu) and re-open it.

To-do list

You will now have this:

At the bottom there is now a 'To Do' list. At present this just has one entry; this entry was created when we filled in the 'Watch for' value when we created the first diary entry. If you right-click on the entry you will get a pop-up menu with two entries: Completed and Dismiss. 'Dismiss' will simply throw away the to-do item, so click 'Completed'. Now go to the Diary choice window and show All Husbandry (as we did before):

(I've changed the dates for narrative purposes). The application has done a bit of work for you - I always forget something, somewhere, so these reminders are quite a help. Select the new entry ('emergence') in the list then click the 'Change' button:

In the 'Watch for' field select 'pot up'. Now double click on the first empty Comment field to bring up the Comment editor:

Enter some text and press the Enter key on your keyboard:

Now click Save, as usual. The next time you show the diary list, you'll see both comments:

You'll have noticed that new comments always have today's date. Once the comment has been saved you can use the Comment editor to change the date (either in the Diary list or, when you use the Change button on a Diary entry, in the list of Comments); just double click on the date.

Just to finish off this section, I'll close and re-open the application to get the to-do 'watch for' item for potting up. I'll then right-click and Complete the action and bring up the editor to show the item (again, I've changed the date) and add a Comment:

Storyline

Now let's go to the Diary list again:

Now select the first entry and right click. In the pop-up menu select 'History' and then 'Later History'. This will show a Storyline for this crop:

This makes it really easy to see what happened to a particular sowing, say.

On the Diary list we could equally have right-clicked the last entry and selected History then 'Prior History' which would have shown us how we got here. Obviously, here, it would be the same information. If you selected the middle line (i.e. the second of the three entries) and right-clicked, the History option will give both Later and Prior History options; when the Diary list gets busy (after a few weeks or months) this makes it much easier to find the whole history of a crop from any point within it.

Note that the same operations are available in the Storyline pages.