Sunday, 14 March 2010

New: Plant Planting Schedules (For both hemispheres!)




Hi all - we've been doing a bit of number crunching at Folia HQ this week, and have released a new little feature on the plant pages to let you see what we are working on.

If you take a wander over to one of the more popular plants (Tomato is always a good example) you'll now see two timelines appear - one for the southern hemisphere, and one for the northern. Basically, we've now got a calculation that runs every week that tallies up all of your journal observations (sow, transplant and harvest), finds the most common months for each, and then splits this tally based on which hemisphere the observation was made in.

We are currently only doing this calculation for plants with over 20 observations per event to make sure that the end result is as accurate as it can be - so this timeline will only currently appear on the most popular plants (which is around 300 or so different species). Hopefully, as more observations are logged we'll have more plants displaying calculated timelines - so remember to log as much and as accurately as you can!

Next step is to look at rolling this down to your plantings - so when you add a new planting or stash item and classify it, we'll be able to calculate a starting schedule for you. Eventually, the plan is to keep segmenting the data and give you a more accurate, more localised version of this schedule (exciting stuff!)

As usual, let us know what you think and how we can make it better!