Kristee Rosendahl, Founder & CEO, Smart Gardener, Inc.

What is Smart Gardener?
Smart Gardener is a free, online personalized solution that lets you easily and conveniently plan, manage, harvest, and even shop for and share, your organic vegetable garden, all in one place.

Why Smart Gardener?
Smart Gardener came out of a keen desire to help make growing your own food easier and more accessible to a larger group of people.

Like a growing number of people, we wanted to grow our own healthy, wonderful tasty food. We wanted to be in control of what goes in the soil, water and amendments, because we know that’s what ends up on our table. It makes us feel good about being a bit less dependent on industrial food practices. Ultimately it satisfies a basic desire to eat well, share meals and homemade gifts with others, and to belong to a larger community that embraces a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

But our family was having a hard time getting there. With only so much time I could spend in our garden, the idea came from my personal frustration, intimidation and the time consuming searches for specific gardening information. Every weekend, I would spend more hours inside getting ready to garden than actually out in our garden!

I poured through gardening books or googled the web for information about the specific plants we were growing, and what needed to be done in our garden right then and throughout the growing season. Oh and by the way, how much of this vegetable should we grow for four people?

So out of this experience came the idea, and ultimately, the product called Smart Gardener.

What makes Smart Gardener different?
Smart Gardener provides you with

*  a personalized Garden Planner

*  customized Weekly To Do list

*  interactive Journal

*  information based entirely on your personal growing conditions and seasons, household size, and food tastes.

How does Smart Gardener work?

Smart Gardener lets you quickly drag and drop your garden layout, find plants easily and in useful ways that are suited to your conditions and tastes, and then see an optimized “smart” garden plan based on your gardens size, crop rotation and orientation to the sun.

Based on that garden, a personalized To Do list is sent to you weekly.

A dynamic Journal automatically tracks when and what you did, allowing you to add images and notes, as well, along the way.

And of course there’s integrated ecommerce with our partner, Peaceful Valley. With one click, anything in your Shopping List on SmartGardener.com is seamlessly transferred to a pre-filled cart on the groworganic.com site, making it easy and convenient for you.

If you want to share your garden or get ideas from other members, celebrity chefs or experts, our Signature Gardens become a powerful way to share or bundle up and present your garden, its “story” and all of our collective gardening experience with one another.

We are really excited about introducing SmartGardener.com to the Peaceful Valley community. From the very beginning, we wanted to partner with Peaceful Valley, as they have a trusted reputation, like-minded values and great products. So a year ago, when we showed them this product concept and they agreed to partner with us, we felt really fortunate. 

Since then, we have managed to input over 500 of their seeds into Smart Gardener, which means we have a substantial collection of their plants for you to choose from (and at the same price you will find in their catalog).

What’s next?
One of our goals for Smart Gardener, is to integrate some of the many useful gardening products Peaceful Valley offers that match well with the particular plants and needs of your edible garden.

Our soon to come community tools will be based on both geo-location and matching up gardeners with the same growing conditions to support and encourage a strong local and regional gardening network that’s highly relevant and meaningful to our users.

We have big plans for Smart Gardener, so stay tuned for more updates as we grow.

We hope you will plan a garden with our free tool: SmartGardener.com. Please let us know what you think. With your input, we can make a better product that helps as many people, families, schools and communities simply grow great food.

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