Harvest Tracking is Here (and Automatic Moving too!)

After working through all your suggestions and feedback about how you want to track your harvests on Folia, we’ve finally rolled out version 1 of Harvest Tracking! We’re really excited about this one (especially me, as I got my first harvest of the year a couple of days ago – how’s that for good timing!)

New Milestone Notes

When you next go to add a new journal item to your journal you should now notice there is a new text field with a comment bubble image. That’s a new field that you can use to write a bit of detail about each journal item – it’s completely optional, but really handy when you want to note a bit more about the event. It’s deliberately limited to 140 characters (just like twitter!) as it is intended to be for short notes that describe the event. So, for example: if you log a treating event for your sick little plant, you can pop a quick little note about what treatments you used. If you log a “Purchase” event you could log how much it was. It’s totally up to you how you use this feature, but hopefully it should give you much more flexibility in how you want to log information in your journal. This feature is for Folia Supporters only – check out our Become a Supporter! page for details.

Harvest Tracking

If you now select “Harvesting” as your event type for a journal item you’ll now magically get a couple of new fields appear – these fields will let you log the number of things you harvested, what amount type it was (items, baskets, cups etc.) and how much it weighed in total. These amounts are then tallied and displayed on your planting page in a new section called “Harvest Tally”. As you can see from my Strawberry example , you can mix and match the units as much as you like – it will tally up all items that are the same and display them together. The weight measurements are also totalled separately to the unit tally – so it should work equally well for precision gardeners that like getting their scales out, and for gardeners that like to work in rough numbers of bowls and bags (I think I might be in the second group there!). We’ve set your default units based on if you are in the US (lb) or elsewhere (kg) – apologies if you are a staunch metric-er and you live in the states! You can however change your default preference on your Account Configuration page to your unit of choice. This feature is for Folia Supporters only – check out our Become a Supporter! page for details.

Automatic moving of your Plantings from your Journal

Whilst we were at it, we also managed to build in a nice little automatic move feature to the journals. What you can do now if you select a “move” event (like transplanted, moved or planted out) is also select which garden it’s being moved to – and it will automatically move it there for you. As a bonus, it also logs where the planting has moved from and to for you! Check out my basil moving journal for an example of how the new move journal items look

Handy dandy links

• If you need some help with understanding how harvest tracking / planting moving works: Help!

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

• If you have any ideas on how we can make things better around the site: Suggestions & Feedback

Filter your growing timeline by garden / Lots-O-Plants

It’s been a bit of a quiet week in terms of new stuff due to our little camping trip last week (yes, it did rain - the entire time!), but we’ve managed to sneak in a couple of minor improvements and bug fixes for you all. One of the improvements is a new filter on your growing timelines* that lets you filter by garden – this should hopefully make navigating around your timelines just a little bit easier :)

We’ve been also working away on a couple of features in the background too – we’ve been importing a whole heap of new plants into the system to make our plant database much more complete and accurate. At last count, we now have a staggering 79,454 plants now in the system – wow indeed! (..and that’s not even counting cultivars and varieties in which we have many thousands more.)

Due to this sudden surge in new plants, we’ve had to start doing a huge amount of work rejigging things like the plant search logic – we’re still working on rewriting this part of the site but we’re hoping that the search is working well enough for now (let us know if it’s not!) We’ll be tweaking and stablising the search over the next couple of weeks, but we’d love your help in testing it out – we’ll let you know when we start rolling out the changes.

*Growing timelines are a Supporter feature – Supporters help us pay for hosting costs to keep this site up-and-running. If you’d like to become a Supporter, check out the Become a Supporter! page.

Read more in the Announcements group: http://myfolia.com/groups/4-folia-announcements/topics/2298/posts

Reviews of Folia on Treehugger & Planet Green

We've had a bit of folia love this week with two lovely reviews on Treehugger and Planet Green - here's a bit of what they said about us:

Folia provides a user-friendly dashboard tool to help users know what plants are being sown and harvested, as well as weather forecasts, seed organizing, and photo organizing so that your garden can grow at its best...Folia's cool webtool helps you get all your seeds in a row - from listing chores to tracking frosts, researching sowing and harvesting timing to tracking observations about your garden.

Nice stuff, hey?