For a personal home garden database it is much easier to just take one of the many existing garden databases (lots of free ones available online) and adjust it to fit your needs. No need to reinvent the wheel. :)

Dave

weirdtrev; I'll get back to you in due course. Some of the questions you posed are ones I haven't so far figured out the answers to.

digdirt2: I've seen a few interactive garden design websites, did a few free trials but passed on. Not sure I'd think of them as databases that I could adjust. Can you point me at any of the ones you're thinking of?

Not really. Not without first knowing what variables you are wanting to track that deviate from the normal variables - name, botanical name, photo, varietal/strain, hybrid/open pollinated, planting date, germination date, location, production, associated pests/diseases, treatments, nutritional et al supplements used, dates of application, sun/shade, grow difficulty, foliage characteristics, notes, etc.

Check out Plotcrop (UK program), Plantgarden.com, PrimaSoft, etc. DMOZ List of available software: http://www.dmoz.org/Home/Gardening/Software/

Thanks, all, for your responses - and for the link & suggestions, digdirt2. I'll go & poke around online but meantime I had put together the following to give some vague indication of what I hope I might build. Note that my interest in plants & gardening is more practical than academic ......
-------------------------------
..... Here's some of the stuff I've (mostly) already got on spreadsheets but they are pretty unwieldy. (Well, unwieldy - but not pretty.) Some of the items are late ideas, not so far incorporated.

Plant name
Variety
OP or hybrid
Annual/biennial
Used for seasonal or overwintered harvest.
Earliest planting date (indoors, outdoors - covered or not, transplant or direct seed)
Alleged days to maturity (or modified by experience.)
Last planting date.
Seed sources & prices
Seed inventory
Seed age, theoretical viability
Grow seed this year?
Buy new seed now?
Grow how many plants at once? - How many sq. ft? - what succession strategy etc.
- and so on.

My records of percentage germination, days to harvest, yield etc are scattered on paper but un-indexed & not very accessible. I'd like to get everything organised in a database together with whatever else I may come up with. There could be lots of that.

I want a database structure that's flexible enough for me to add not just records but tables and table columns as/when appropriate. And I want to learn LO base "just because." My "college" consists of free online tutorials in .pdf or on Youtube. Sadly I'm a bit too distant from learning centres and far too long in the tooth, to start studying more basic or lower-language approaches - SQL? etc. (Apologies if my language is technically inaccurate. Hopefully my meaning comes across.)

Anyway I'm sure I sound like a (longwinded) hopeless case and maybe I am; but I'm stubborn & any useful hints & (gentle, simple :)) tips would be welcome.

Thanks for the suggestions. The idea of putting every thing into a single table doesn't have much appeal; at least one of my spreadsheets is already is already much more "widespread" than I like. Plotcrop looks very interesting - might do everything I want without the agony of learning how to create as I go along. I'm thinking about downloading the trial version to see how I get on with it. If it works for me I can relax about learning Base, get the pressure off and take my time building simpler example databases.

My first thought was 1) did you want to just have a gardening database or 2) did you want to learn how to create a database. Looks like its a combination of both.

There are some existing tools out there, however, I haven't been very impressed with them, so I do commend you on your goal of creating your own.

Yes, if you're new to databases, learning about them can really make your head spin. but if you start off keeping it fairly simple, its not too bad. As weirdtrev said, you can keep most of your data in one main table and create your forms or generate your reports from queries based on that table. Your main table would be based on "plant name" with unique values for each record.

You could use additional tables to store data to be selected from dropdowns on your main form via listbox or combobox, or you could use them for a one-to-many relationship connected by an unique key value. For example, you could have your growing notes for each year per plant name stored in a separate table and then display them in subform on your main form so you can scroll through from year to year to see how the plant performed.


I can sort of envision what all this would look like and how it would work, but that's not easy to put into words or explain to someone new to databases.

I haven't developed any databases in Libreoffice, but might need to install it and see what it's all about.

Again, I do commend you on your challenge. Perhaps something can be built and developed that will be useful and benefit others as well.

Nitsua; you're right that I'd like to both learn how to use LO Base, and have a garden database that does what I want. But it could be that trying to build that base while learning the application is asking too much of my old brain. I'm looking at Plotcrop to use while I experiment with Base (or not :)) I should have mentioned that my chosen OS is Linux Mint: Plotcrop wants Windows and I can boot into XP but would rather not have to.

weirdtrev: (Trevor?) Thanks for your comments. I think I grasp the general ideas of datatbase structure and the non-triviality of relationships between tables. (LONG time ago I once wrestled ineffectively with Dbase in DOS; can't remember why but I know it was agonising.) I see the potential for incorrect & screwy results which is partly why my head spins trying to visualise the structure.

It's a long time since I used Excel - I mostly work in a Linux distribution now and only boot Windows for a proprietary program that won't run otherwise - so I don't remember details of how it worked; queries for example. Haven't seen the word pseudocode before but I think I get the meaning, and I see how querying a spreadsheet could maybe fulfill my wishes instead of using a DB. I don't think there's a query facility built in to LO Calc but there is a filter facility. Maybe there's a way to store different filter configurations - I'll have to check. That would be similar to storing pseudocoded queries?

Jeepers, I'm spending more time writing about this issue that getting on with solving it - NOT really; and I greatly appreciate all the helpful advice that's been posted. Keep it coming!

VanIsle_BC
(Alexander)