Newsletter enhancements: Your neighbours and local folia groups

Hi all – we made a couple of little enhancements to the newsletters for this week: you’ll now find a new section called “In Your Local Area”.

This section will now show you:

• What is currently sprouting, transplanting and being harvested in your region
• Recommended gardeners near you that you might like to follow
• New gardeners in your area that you might like to follow and welcome to the site
• Your nearest local folia gardening groups that you might like to join

Hopefully this should encourage a bit of neighbourly folian following!

Let us know what you think!

New Feature: Yearly Seed Planning Schedules

The major new feature in today’s release is the Seed Planning Schedule that you’ll now find appearing on your Seed Stash pages – this feature should hopefully make planning when to plant and when to harvest a whole lot easier!

I’ve been working on updating my list today – so take a look at my Seed Stash for a bit of an example of how it works:

Nic’s Seed Stash page

Nic’s Broad Bean ‘Bunyards Exhibition’

How does it work?
Over on your Stash List, you’ll now see a little row of grey boxes under each of your stash items – this is your individual schedule that you can edit to list the sowing, transplanting and harvest / blooming months. To edit, go to your Stash Edit page and scroll down a bit until you see the Planting Schedule section. Check the boxes of the months for each one, then Save your Stash Item and it should magically appear on your schedule bar.

This is a Supporter feature (non Supporters will be able to see the schedule bars to get a feel for how they work but don’t have the ability to edit). Supporters keep Folia going by helping to pay for our server hosting costs: for more information about Supporter Features take a wander over to your Upgrade Account page.

Handy dandy links

• If you need some help with getting started with this feature: Help!

• If you think you’ve found a bug: Bugs & Issues

• If you have any ideas on how we can make this feature even better: Suggestions & Feedback

Multi-planting journaling is here!

Recently, we released a fabulous new feature to the site - the ability to journal about multiple plantings and gardens in a single journal entry. We've been flat-out with fixes, improvements and enhancements on this feature for the last couple of weeks, but now we are finally ready to announce it to everyone!

So, how does it work?

Before, a journal was linked to only one of your garden "things" - so it was either a journal about one of your plantings, or a journal about one of your gardens. We've totally rejigged the way journals work in the backend so now journals can be linked to multiple things. So, you can journal simultanously about your backyard garden, your windowsill garden and your 4 basil plantings. There is no limit to the number of items you can link to your journals - so it gives everyone much more flexibility as to how they want to organise their gardening journal.

Let's see an example!

Okay, so on your journal page you'll now find a big search box that will find all of your gardens and plantings. Type a couple of characters, and a list of possible matches will appear. Select the item you want to add to your journal and it will appear in your "journal items" list.

After you've added your plantings and gardens to your journal item list, you can then assign events to each - these events will appear as milestones on your growing timelines. You'll also see a day counter appear next to each - so you can see for each item in your journal precisely how old each planting was when the event happened.

So, if you haven't been in for a while, give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

Improved Journal Features - auto happiness updating & more events!

Okay – this is the last announcement from last week’s changes – it’s now taken over a week to announce everything! Phew!

The final one, which many of you have probably already noticed by now, is a couple of small enhancements to the Add a Journal Entry page :

1. We’ve added a couple of new options to journal events – some of the new events are: Pruning, Branching, Treating, Fertilising and Moved (which will also let you select the new garden it’s been moved into at the same time!)
2. Plant Happiness is now able to be updated from the journal page – if you select “Happy” then the plant will also be automatically updated to reflect the latest happiness (supporter only at this stage)

Export your Planting Data to Excel

Another day, another feature (well okay, the feature was already there yesterday - but I thought I would split up the announcements this week since we have so many new features!)

On your plantings page, next to the "printable version" link there is also a link to download your planting list as an Excel file for your own backups. We'll be adding more data to this file over time - milestones is on the list, but if you can think of any other handy data to add let us know :)

This feature is only available to Supporters (it's actually a bit like Supporter Christmas this week). If you want to find out more about becoming a Supporter, go take a look at our Supporter page.