Mr. Boots & Gidget
Believe it or not, tomorrow is the first day of Spring. March came in like a lion for most of us and some still face frozen earth and piles of snow. Here in the mountains of western North Carolina we see a light at the end of the tunnel and are optimistic that March will, in fact, go out like a lamb.
We’ve started getting things in order. That includes getting all our garden records up to date in Muddy Boots Plant Tags. It’s a good time for us to share a bit of information about how we use the application and we hope this will help you be more successful and satisfied.
Getting Ready to Input Plant Information
Before we start inputting and updating plant information, we get all our notes together and put all the photos we plan to update into one folder on our computer. We also resize our photos so they upload more quickly. This is more of an issue for people like us who live in a rural area and have slow internet speeds. The photos that come directly off a smart phone are typically about 3-4 megabytes in size. Photos that come off a digital camera can be far larger – 10 megabytes or more. We resize our photos to about half a megabyte, or 500k. Even if you don’t resize your photos in advance, the application will reduce the size after the upload to ensure that they load more quickly when you’re viewing them in Muddy Boots Plan Tags.
The notes we gather about the plants include:
- Where is the plant in our garden?
- When did we plant it?
- Where did the plant come from (the source)?
Is there a link to an external website such as a botanical garden that provides more data about the characteristics of the plant? This link can be pasted into the ‘datasheet’ field in the plant record. For instance, for our Burkwood Viburnum (Viburnum × burkwoodii), we include a link to the Missouri Botanical Garden. It allows us to have rich details about the nature of the plant without replicating all the data in Muddy Boots Plant tags.
o Click here to see the Missouri Botanical datasheet for Burkwood Viburnum
o Click here to see our Burkwood Viburnum at Muddy Boots Plant Tags
Once we have this information together we’re ready to start adding it to the application.
- We add the plant record and the datasheet link.
- We add any photos we have of the plant. We keep photos over time to document how the plant looks during different seasons and over several years.
- We add journal notes where appropriate, such as when it was pruned, fertilized or has exhibited a striking bloom. We think of journal notes as something akin to a diary for each of our plants.
- We add a plant tag if appropriate. We don’t tag all of our plants, but since we’re preparing to be on garden tour again this June, we’ll be sure to tag the plants of greatest interest. This makes a better experience for our garden tour visitors because they can scan the plant tag view all the details, photos and notes about our plants on their smart phone or tablet.
We hope this helps you make the most of your of Muddy Boots Plant Tags.
Happy Spring! Mr. Boots