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It’s Time! Best Gardening Apps for 2014

With warm weather and spring now in full bloom, it’s time to get serious about our gardens. Growing fresh vegetables is fun and healthy and I have some apps for smartphones and tablets that will help your garden grow like you really have a green thumb.

My favorite app this year is the Organic Gardening Planting Planner for the iPhone. It starts with a calendar to maximize your planning and time your planting for your region of the country. This free guide covers vegetable, fruits and flowers, from artichokes to zucchini. This is a great resource app for new and experienced gardeners alike.

gardeningThe Burpee Seed people have a great app for Android and Apple devices called the Garden Time Planner. The app also tells you the best times to plant and it has an impressive database of plants, local weather, and links to how-to gardening videos. There’s also a calendar that tells what you should be doing by what dates.

Then there’s Plant Link. This puts a wireless sensor in your garden to monitor moisture. It connects to the Internet and then alerts you when your plants are too dry. You can even connect a hose to the system so your garden is automatically watered… no mater where in the world you happen to be. The cost? $79. The Plant link system works indoors or outdoors and you can add extra sensors.

Mike is a veteran journalist whose video "PC Mike" reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.