Do you really need a plant list?

My Folia, the wonderful database-cum-community blog for gardeners, is shutting down for good on August 14.

While the community part has been a critical reason for the success and value of the site, the rich community-developed database is going to be the part that will have many of its gardeners feeling the pain.

There are three critical pieces of this database: the plant list, the seed stash, and the milestones. They’re all interconnected, and used consistently created a years-long portrait of every plant in the garden. While the site’s owners have created a download option (but only for current plants, not for archived ones), losing this web of information will be hard.

So Folians have been coming up with solutions. For my current gardens, I created Flickr albums with detailed information including botanical name, common name, cultivar, and how I acquired each plant. It’s not a database, but at least the data is preserved. I’ll lose the milestones (bloom dates, dormancy dates, harvest info, etc.) but at least I’ve got the plants. (And this is where I mention thank god Folia never did the direct photo upload we all begged for, for years. Because then I’d be losing all my photos, too.)

Gardener Carol has been setting up an Access database (left; sorry about the size). Kelly, of Populuxe Seed Bank, has had a separate wiki for the seed bank for a while now. There are other tech-savvy solutions as well, which works best, of course, if you’re tech savvy.

I have no idea what I’ll do. I’m still stuck on the ease with which I could just click on the Folia plant link to see whether my bloom was later or earlier, how well a given tomato did, and is it really getting warmer earlier?

Guess I’ll go back to analyzing wooly-bears.

Are you a Folian? Please join us on Facebook in the new Folians group.

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