Hi all!

Just wanted to share an application of Tindebrox which is still in the works, but proves to be quite useful for me: Gardening.

Basically i created a note for every plant in our garden, and arranged them onto a map representing more or less the shape and location of our beds, trees, buildings etc.



The notes for the plants contain also information about when to seed/plant/harvest etc. them, which is then used by agents to give an overview of the monthly work to be done:



In the future i plan to add also some observations-info about how different plants react best to what places in the garden (sunshine/wind exposure/soil etc.).

Any further ideas are very welcome!

Andreas

Hello Paul!

Yes, it has become very useful for me, simply because i'm a beginner in gardening and tend therefor to forget about some stuff. And besides that its a bit like writing my own "Garden-Experience/History noteboook".

So far i haven't done any exports, over time when theres more information for some plants that might become useful i guess.

Quote:

Sure First i want to make some changes, mainly because the basic structure of the file was done more than a a year ago - now i want to use Badges, Note shapes and Sets for further enhancing the optic appearence and make usability easier. I will do that within the next days, but at the moment i'm busy with those slugs in the garden, where Tinderbox sadly enough can't help  

Andreas

Hi Christoph!

Yes, taking pictures migth be interesting for me as well ... and i plan - over the years - to harmonize the temporal sequence with the help of tinderbox as well. Google Earth won't work well for me, the resolution of the image where i live simply isn't good enough to make any sense.

And i will be happy to write here more about my experiences with it, as well as to read yours How do you plan to use the images of the plants in the Tinderbox-project?

Andreas

I use Tinderbox for ecological landscape design. I've entered a few hundred plants into a TBX file, with User Attributes for everything from human uses (like food, medicine, or coppice) to habitat and native range, to ecological function (like N-fixing, groundcover, insectary, etc.) to soil pH, light and moisture preferences.

I've used the amazing Edible Forest Gardens Vol II, by Dave Jacke, as my main source for plant info.

Then I create custom agents for different site characteristics, and use the results to create polyculture guilds, with every ecological function taken care of by at least one plant species, and some food and medicine produced to boot.

In the future I think I'll use base maps (or Google Earth images) as background for placing the agents in spatial relationship.

What I REALLY want, long term, is to figure out how to export a given collection of notes, representing a master plant list, in a useful spreadsheet-style format. I'm just not there yet in my tinderbox acumen.

If only somebody would pay me to do TBX fulltime!

Rafter, if you've some specimen data and a slightly more detailed description of what you want in the spreadsheet I'm sure I can help with the spreadsheet export.  TB can certainly export - for instance - a tab-delimited text file such as Excel can read - though at worst we might need to tweak the internal format with a re-save in something (free) like TextWrangler. The latter would only be necessary if the default export from TB wasn't readable into Excel - under the hood not all 'text' is the same, even supposed 'plain text'. As ever the Devil's in the detail...the exact template depends on what you're trying to do. By all means drop me an email to discuss detail lest this get into a long divergent thread**; no liability except I'd like to be able to share the broad details with the TB community when done.

** I think previous readers misunderstood my post.  I was merely trying to avoid a narrow technical issue of data export technique getting cross-threaded with the wider topic and TB, Gradening. etc. Many user's prefer not to pass complete personal source (TBX) data to a public - thus the offer of looking at it privately. Indeed the whole point was to look for things from that to share back with the TB community in suitably sanitised form. Oh well, no good deed goes unpunished!  

Christoph, no problem at all. I didn't mean to stop discussion of the Gardening & TB but simply avoid the narrower tech point of exporting data for spreadsheet use getting interwoven, especially if sorting one particular persons exports neds (i.e. exact attribute names, etc). Anyway, since my last post here and for anyone interested in export for spreadsheets, I've already posted a specimen file (linked via a new topic) that will show how to go about export to tab-delimited or CSV text file; that topic will let discussion of the fine detail of export not interrupt this interesting thread on TB, gardening and plants.

@Mark Anderson
good point about branching off side aspects to maintain a clearer focus. So long as valuable discussion are not continued in private emails all is well. Thanks for being around so much

Christoph

To Mark A:

I'd would love some help! What I'd like is to have a few standard templates, with different selections of attributes.

I would want to be able to import a file to excel, that would then have the first column of all plant names, and then the cells of each row comprised of characteristics of that plant  (that are values from user attributes).

How does one email you, if one wants to share samples and specifications?