So I'm diligently planning away, saving as I go, but when I come back to the "saved" garden it's reverted to an older version. Does the system object to too many non-default plants (e.g. single plants if row is the default, custom labelled or completely unlabelled plants)?

Clare_b74,

Sorry for the problem in using the software!

Good news and bad news. Good news is that this weekend I really beefed up the save feature. Before you just saved the file and it replaced the old one. Thus before this weekend I had no way to retrieve to track down problems in saving files. Now plangarden keeps a version of the garden for you to continue editing, but there is a backup of every save that you do. I have 8 backups of files that you haved on February 12th and one from February 10th. Moving forward I will have a complete history of all your saves and I will keep a backup online and also place them on a second remote location periodically for extra safety.

Bad news is that in moving over to the new system and some other changes that I did may have been the cause of your problem and there may be a bug in my garden software that I haven't seen yet.

I do need your help in describing what plant or varieties that seem to have been lost or not working properly. Please let me know what you had worked on and as best as you can what is lost. More good news is that I may be able to recover it or fix up the file.

There is corrupted data in the file that I can't explain now. It looks like it happened before 2/10/06 and that you may have found a character that the system didn't like. Just thinking, it may have been a &. If you can remember some of the names that you typed in, that will help. I have not tested all combinations of character, and I might need to encode some character.


To answer your question there is no limit to the number of special vegetable names that you can have in the software. It simply keeps adding them to a growing list. Someday I will add a vegetable editor that has the sole purpose of managing the vegetables for plan garden exactly the way that you like with all your favorite varieties and none of my defaults.

Thanks,
Roy

Hi.

Thanks for anwering my questions about saving, sorry not to have replied earlier. Everything seems to be saving a-ok now. I think I was contributing to the problem by having three (eg. tomato) icons up to plot out my spacings but only attached a name for one of them to save some clutter. I can see now that the Log would have a few problems with that...

One thing's occured to me in my planning which may be something to consider - given this is a veggie-specific (at the moment anyway!) program, it would be handy to have two Manage Vegetables tabs for summer and winter plantings. Maybe I'm missing something as I haven't got into the non-virtual garden yet and haven't used the Harvest and Daily Log functions much, but strikes me that a two-tab system could save a lot of re-building with each year's new planting.

This week's improvements are looking beaut BTW!

Cheers,
Clare

Clare,

The saving was not your problem, you should be able to do whatever you want. I found a glitch that caused much of the problems. There is more testing, but I think saving is now safe.

Let me give you some foreshadowing the future. Once you have a plot you use the same one every year since 90% of the time your garden layout doesn't change. If you are lucky and have more than one growing season, there will be a new feature that I plan to add where you can ghost items that are done being harvested in the year. Example: You plant peas in early spring and they are out of the garden in time for some late zuchinni, you won't delete the peas, just click a checkbox that says they are removed and all your harvest information is saved.

The next year when you start again, you will start with your garden layout with no plants. You will be able to go back and review any past garden to check on how you want to rotate crops, what have done well in the sunny spots etc. So you will have a record of years past. Since this is the first year for everyone (except what I was playing with last year) There is no historical records.

I am building this as I go. What you see today will only get better and improve with your feedback and experience. I am new to virtual gardening too. I just wanted to make software that would help me and help others keep better records, plan better and improve in gardening each year.

By the way if I am missing the point you are making, please let me know. I hope I have covered it here, but if not let me know so I can help build the virtual garden planner that helps you.

Thanks,
Roy

Hi Roy,

I'm a new user and just saved my garden layout. I received the pop-up window that said "garden has been saved" or similar. I tried to log in again right after I saved to verify it did save. However the layout wasn't / isn't there. Any thoughts? Is there a way to recover? Did I do something wrong? Thanks for your time,

Angie

This was fixed a while back as well. Problems with characters flying around the app and getting encoded wrong.