Grow Your Own for the digital age

As part of its highly successful Grow Your Own campaign, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has launched its first ever iPhone application - designed to help novice gardeners and would-be growers develop their own fruit and veg patch in whatever space they have available.  The RHS app helps the user to plan their garden based on the amount of time, space and know-how they possess...

... Once they have selected the level of gardening that suits them – whether experimenting with a grow-bag or nurturing a veg plot – the app will recommend the perfect fruit and veg varieties to try.

With 20 produce profiles, complete with sowing, growing, harvesting and trouble shooting advice, the RHS believes this app will encourage even the faint-hearted to develop green fingers and try their hand at growing their own.

Susannah Charlton, Online Publisher at the RHS, said, "This is a hugely exciting initiative for the RHS. Using new media like apps and our website to help more people to get growing is just what we want to be doing as the UK’s leading gardening charity. We know there is a large appetite out there for information on how to grow your own, especially as 28,000 people have already signed up to our campaign online, so we feel this is the perfect tool to offer people right now."

The app will be released in stages, the first available now, with rolling upgrades throughout the year. The next phase of the app (end of April) will provide users with tailored alerts and ‘jobs to do’ based on their fruit and veg choices; while the further phases (May and June) will create an interactive community for growers to join. Via an online map, users will be able to email other growers in their neighbourhood to share ideas, ask for help or just make friends.

The 2010 RHS Grow Your Own campaign launched at the beginning of March with an online ‘Veg Pledge’ and to date over 25,000 people have committed to grow their own over the year – making it the fastest growing RHS campaign of all time.

The app is free to download from iTunes and compatible with iPhones and iPod Touches. For more information on the RHS Grow Your Own app visit www.rhs.org.uk/iphone.