Who’s this guide for?

I’m regularly sharing views onto my database in the description of my YouTube videos and in this book. If you want to make best use of these views, then this chapter is for you. If you want to create your own database using Airtable or take a copy of mine, then this chapter should be pretty useful as well.

<aside> 💡 If you want to takea copy of my database or create your own you will need a free Airtable account. It will help me out if you use my referral link to get started!

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A readonly (only I can change it) copy of my database is available in multiple ways. You can find small slices of it, called views, embedded into the pages of this book. A view might be - for example - a list of my recommended potato varieties. By embedding this data in the book it’s always up to date. If I change the database, add a new potato variety for example, anywhere in the book that includes that data is instantly up to date.

Wherever you see embedded views in my book you can click on the little arrow (see below) and you see the same view but in it’s own full window/tab, this view is more powerful.

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You will also often see links to views in the database, for example here’s a link to everything that I’m planning to grow this year.

Finally, you can see my whole database, you can do anything I can do in this copy of the database, except make changes.

You can find the whole databse here.

If you want to do more than look at my data, then you can take a copy of my data, or my whole database, or just a single table or view, read on for how to do this!

Introduction

My database is built using the web based application Airtable. You can’t run Airtable offline on your PC or Mac, but you can access it from within this ebook, using the web, using Windows or OSX applications or using (slightly limited) Android and iOS applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F8Iir02XbQ

I’ve tried lots of different ways to plan my garden over the years. I started with nothing more than a sketch of the plot and eventually progressed to a spreadsheet, but I didn’t stick with any of them. As a result I grew too much of many things and too little of others. I had way too much in summer and very little in winter. What I noticed the most was that I always had lots of beds standing idle, sometimes for months at a time.

What annoyed me more than anything about my early - failed - attempts as a planner was the inefficiency of my gardening, in that I was spending way too much time and getting lack luster results and how much I disliked planning.

<aside> 💡 Strictly speaking my gardening planning database is just that, it’s a database. However taken together it’s much more: my videos, this chapter of my book, the processes I’ve embedded in the database, the knowledge base I’ve added to the database and my planning data make it feel more like an app. As a result I often refer to it interchangeably as database and app. Normally I use app to describe the whole ‘system’ and database, table, views etc to refer to the component parts.

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Everything changed when I discovered Airtable, a cloud hosted database platform, which I used to build the first version of the gardening app, that I will be describing in this chapter of my book. My app changed a lot about the way I garden, here are some of the highlights:

  1. Very few empty beds, I almost always have living roots in the soil
  2. Lots of successions and well timed relay plantings and inter-plantings
  3. Much higher yield overall
  4. A lot less stress as the system keeps me on top of things, fairly effortlessly
  5. Much better organisation, meaning I can grow more successions and more varieties
  6. Planning became a lot of fun
  7. Better data, that helps me improve from year to year
  8. We saved a lot of money on food and as a result I was able to fund my allotment at zero cost

Here are some of the nice things about Airtable as a platform:

  1. extremely visual. Whilst it resembles a spreadsheet, it includes images in a very compelling and beautiful way. I’m a very visual person so this really appealed to me and made planning a joy. Whereas spreadsheets left me word blind, I loved looking at my Airtable gallery views.
  2. extremely flexible. It makes it really easy to create custom ‘views’ onto my data. For example in my sowing log I have a set of views that make it really easy to keep on top of my seedling pipeline. Here’s a few examples:
    1. What I’ve still got to sow this month
    2. What’s sowed, but not yet germinated
    3. What’s germinated, but still not planted
    4. What’s planted, but not yet harvested
  3. well integrated. I have several tables in my app that together create a process flow from types of veg, planted in multiple successions, with each succession potentially using different varieties, each of which needs to be sowed, planted and harvested.
  4. easy to access and update, from a desktop/laptop web browser, to a tablet or smartphone. No matter where you access it from it’s always up to date
  5. easy to share with other people. You can either share your whole database, or just specific views and I make a lot of use of this