Welcome to Gardenaut!

Welcome to our little corner of the world! While you're here, we'd like to introduce ourselves.

We're Jeremiah, Jennifer, and Z McNichols, the folks behind the parenting product review site Z Recommends, the parenting giveaway blog PRIZEY, and the toy hacks wiki Toyinstructions. We live in Central Texas on two acres and love to grow our own food. We're hoping to help beginning and would-be gardeners have success with their early gardening efforts, to draw out wisdom from more experienced gardeners and share it with readers, and develop and provide some web tools for gardeners to use.

The Gardenaut Garden Planner
The first of these is the beta version of a web-based garden planner that offers customized planting dates for the continental United States based on your area's average frost-free date. The tool generates a printable sheet of crop-by-crop instructions for sowing and transplanting or direct-seeding crops based on safe planting dates, and offers some unusual tweakability based on your own experience and hunches as a gardener.

My (Your) Gardenaut
The planner also produces a "GNumber," the number of days into the year your last frost date falls on. If you enter that, your zip code, and the state in which you reside into the form fields at lower right, you'll also have access to the special web searches and tools displayed under the "My Gardenaut" heading in the righthand sidebar. These are just the first steps in a "dashboard" of customized tools, measurements, and Gardenaut-created web applications we'll be rolling out in the months to come. Like our garden, this blog will grow and flower as the season progresses, and our biggest challenge will be juggling both projects as we get back in the groove of gardening now that our daughter Z is old enough to truly enjoy it.

On Gardenaut you can expect to see:

• Hands-on how-to posts about organic gardening techniques
• Thoughtful, unbiased reviews of gardening products
• Links to advice, thoughtful posts, and projects on other great gardening blogs
• A journal of our own gardening efforts
• Gardenaut-researched directories of useful information for gardeners
  
• Links to online resources and tools for gardeners

To get things rolling, we'll be posting a few times a week, with a goal of Monday through Friday posting in a few months' time. We'd love to have you share your garden successes and wisdom with us along the way. You can subscribe to Gardenaut using the links on the upper right, or join our mailing list if you'd like us to let you know when we launch new online gardening tools, and we'd love feedback and advice on what we're doing in our garden, whether we ask for it explicitly or not. We are inspired amateurs with wisdom and experience in a select few gardening areas, but with a lot to learn from other blogging and blog-reading gardeners!