Permaculture Plant Database

I had talk a couple of weeks ago with a friend about the idea of building a permaculture database, running it on a SQL server and providing some type of user interface. The idea being, it would provide what ever information you’d like about a planet. It’s as simply or complex as you liked. For example, want to know what grows well with tomatoes, a simply search will tell you. Or for something a bit more complex, want to know what kind of planet would fit well into your apple tree guild, needs only partial shade, fixes nitrogen and is hardy up to zone 6?

Well it looks like someone has the same idea, except they are actually doing theirs. The Permaculture Plant Database. Admittedly it’s not a sexy website per say, but then again for true nerds nothing is sexier than raw information. The upside is, it’s very simple to understand what they are providing, you go to the site, you make some selections from drop down boxes, you search, and then you can browser through all the entries.

My original idea was to not only build a searchable database, but it was to use that data base to help gardeners and permaculturalist build plant communities, guilds, and sustainable environments. I think it would be brilliant to attached some kind of GUI to this type of database and have a drag and drop function onto an empty “garden”. So when I drag an apple tree to my garden, my side panels are populated with choices of other plants, herbs, and trees that would all be beneficial, depending on whether you wanted to simply companion plant, interplant, or build a guild.

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