Planning Your Garden Can Require a Soft(ware) Touch

How difficult is it to fill in that little gap in your yard where the ferns fried and the day lilies choked and died?

If you’ve got a green thumb, it may not be a problem. If you’re all thumbs--and none are green--you may seriously want to consider asphalt-- unless you own a home computer.

A new computer program called RootDirectory could appear like a ray of sunlight to homeowners and apartment gardeners who know nothing about plants but who can’t justify paying someone else to tell them where to put their petunias.

Books such as Sunset Western Garden, Hortus Third or any of a number of do-it-yourself gardening books can be extremely helpful if you know what you’re looking for.

But with this program, the answers can be supplied for you by punching a few keys; all you do is answer some simple questions, such as: Where do you live? How big is your planting space? Do you want shade?

This budding phenomenon is the brainchild of Randy Farrar, a lifelong gardener--and software developer at TRW. The program is the hybrid born of Farrar’s combining his knack for computers with his love of gardening.

“It’s a perfect match,” said Farrar, 31, who developed the program during lunch hours, after work and on weekends. “And it’s as easy to use as a microwave.

“There’s so much information out there for gardening. There’s an information overload. The program organizes it all. In Sunset (Western Garden Book), say you want a bulb-like flower, you want it to bloom in summer in filtered shade. You go to the index . . . and you have to jump around to look things up and cross reference--and it may take you a half an hour, or hours, to figure it out. That’s why everyone’s growing petunias.

“With RootDirectory, the program asks you what you want and gives you a detailed list of choices.”

Farrar is convinced that with his program, indoor types (i.e. amateurs) can plan their yards with the aplomb of a landscape designer. Whether planting a simple bulb or planning an extensive landscape, it can be as productive as consulting a gardening expert, he said.

And that, essentially, is what users of RootDirectory are doing. All of the information contained in the program was gathered through Farrar’s extensive research--and his own experience.

Farrar has always been at home with Mother Nature. From age 14 he worked in a nursery, watering, pulling weeds--and doing research with plant breeding and plant materials.

He branched out in college, earning a bachelor’s degree in agricultural business management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. At Cal Poly, he developed a sense for recognizing what he considers good and bad gardening practices.

“The instructor wanted us to use pesticides to kill off moths,” he recalls about one field project. “We had to put on these space suits, and I asked, ‘Do I have to wear this?’ He said, ‘You do if you want to have children.’

“It convinced me--and set my philosophy about pesticides--you don’t need them.”

Insects and Pests

In his Insects and Pests module, Farrar offers his own home remedies and proven natural methods ( organic is such a yuppie term, he said, flinching) to rid a garden of pesky intruders--and there’s no space suit or threat to fertility involved.

With the insect and pest program, gardeners can find a solution to their pest problem if they know what the intruder looks like, or “the program will ask for a damage report,” Farrar said, and the perpetrator can be identified that way.

“If the leaves are being chomped on, and there’s slime all over, that’s a snail or slug,” he said.

After the pest is identified, the program “will give you information on their life cycle, because if you can control that organically, you can pretty much eliminate the problem for several years--I have, and this area is notorious for snails and slugs.”

New Farming Methods

After college, Farrar went into farming. “It’s what I really wanted to do,” he said. But he didn’t have unrealistic fantasies of living life like farmers of yesteryear. His ideas had to do with experimenting with new farming methods and improving efficiency, like farming in beds: Instead of turning the soil over, “you cut down 12-14 inches into the soil. Beds are permanent and they aerate the soil.” And incorporating a chicken coop with a greenhouse: “The heat from the chicken coop keeps the greenhouse warm.”

The best examples of Farrar’s gardening philosophy are right in his own yard. Farrar, his wife, Sheri, and two daughters, Lindsay, 4, and Natalie, 7 months, live in a cozy home on a small lot in Redondo Beach--small enough that most people wouldn’t even worry about landscaping.

But in this limited space, Farrar grows raspberries, nectarines, boysenberries, plums, apples, tangerines, vegetables and an array of lush plants arranged in a neat and attractive landscape--and all grown organically.

Third World Projects

Farrar has put hundreds of hours into his software project, but he has some pretty lofty goals for all his efforts. “My ultimate goal is to do Third World projects,” he said.

One of the attractive features of his computer program is that it gives the user the ability to call up a definition of an unfamiliar word by simply putting the cursor on the word and pressing a “hot button.” The definition then appears over a portion of the screen.

In the tree module, for instance, you can “call up trees that can be dwarf and the tree type will be highlighted--evergreen, deciduous, needled-evergreen.” You click on deciduous and a definition appears that says: “Tree that loses its leaves in summer.”

Cost is $29.95

Similar programs put out by companies like Ortho for the nursery trade sell for $1,000 or more; each one of Farrar’s modules costs $29.95. Why the difference?

“Gardeners are cheap to begin with--I am,” Farrar explained. “You don’t want to spend a lot on a gardening tool, and that’s what I want this to be. I don’t want them to spend any more on this than they would on a good gardening tool.”

To use the program, you begin by choosing a module (trees, flowers, insects and pests, etc.). Say you chose the tree module. First, you find your zone on a color-coded map of the United States.

(The Los Angeles coastal area is Zone 10; the San Fernando Valley is Zone 9.) You click on Zone 10, and the computer will ask what function you want the tree to have. (“Trees need to be planted for a purpose, not just stuck somewhere,” Farrar said. “Most people have a purpose, they just can’t explain it.”)

Intelligent Gardening Tool

The program is designed to ask specific questions about the tree’s purpose: Do you want fall color? What color? What height? (Click on a graphic that shows tree heights compared to a 6-foot man--”people don’t realize how tall ’75 foot’ is,” Farrar said.) How do you want it to look? (Another graphic shows tree forms from round to umbrella-shaped.)

“You’re not going to buy this software for one tree,” Farrar says. “But you can use it as an intelligent gardening tool.”

And you can put together a drought-tolerant, shady, sunny, appetizing, tantalizing landscape with all the information within your reach--as long as you have an IBM-compatible personal computer.

“If a person has all these knowledge bases, he does not need a landscape designer,” Farrar said. “It’s a useful tool for the professional gardener and horticulturist as well as for people who don’t know anything about plants.”

If gardeners find bugs in their system, there’s no need to fear, Farrar offers two free upgrades (system updates)--and “a minimal charge” for future upgrades, so owners of RootDirectory will always be up-to-date.

Like with all good software, “it’ll never be finished,” Farrar said.

INFORMATION ON ROOTDIRECTORY The software require an IBM or compatible personal computer, 640K memory; EGA and hard disk. Call or write for mail-order copies of trees, flowers or pest modules ($29.95 each): GardenTech, 1730 Goodman Ave., Redondo Beach, Calif. 90278; (213) 372-5810.