Garden with Insight: a garden simulator

Hey all,

I just found a neat, and free (released under GPL license) tool for a virtual garden simulator. It's old, circa 2000, so it might not be a great tool, I haven't test it yet, but I will today I hope. It seems like a useful too, at least for basic educational usage, but I haven't tested it yet so I don't know if it's any good or not.

It only runs on Windows, but it may run under WINE (for MAC, *nix), or other windows emulator for MAC, *nix, etc. And of course, it runs under a Windows virtual install on MAC, *nix, etc.

Get it here: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/summary_gwi.html

The Garden with Insight garden simulator is an educational simulation that uses weather, soil, and plant growth models to simulate a simple garden in an open-ended microworld setting. You can plant vegetables and grow them to learn more about plants, the soil, the weather, gardening, and science.

You can download this software here.

This page incorporates most of the still-relevant content about Garden with Insight. To look at the old (archived) GWI pages click here.

The archival GWI help system has over 600 pages of information about the science behind gardening (it's the main reason we're keeping all the pages up even though most of them are quite old). You can use it as a resource to learn about things like

• nutrient cycling,
• pH,
• soil porosity,
• movement of water through the soil,
• photosynthesis,
• leaf area index,
• heat unit index,
• plant competition for water and nutrients, and
• about simulations in general.

Click to expand...

I hope people test it and it's useful for simulating a cannabis garden, ex. for radiation use efficiency (RUE) in terms of effects of various LAI's (Leaf Area Index), rate of photosynthesis, soil/soilless media properties, etc, etc. However, I have some doubts about it's usefulness. But I did think it's a worthwhile thread to start...