Jenny (00:28)
We all use our cell phones all the time. You're probably using one to listen to this episode right now. We use it for lots of personal things, but we also need to be using them as a business tool on the farm as well. Technology is our friend sometimes let's embrace it. And I am the first person to say that I actually don't love technology. I don't really get along with it. I take a really long time to figure things out. Like.
When Instagram reels started being a thing, it took me forever to figure out how to use it and how to do it. this podcast way too many hours spent on YouTube trying to figure out how to start it, how to do it. however, everything has improved so much since I have embraced being a person in year 2024 and using technology. And I am very.
Old school in a lot of ways. I love pen and paper. I still keep a paper planner. I take tons of farm notes in notebooks. I have like physical notebooks for a bunch of our records that we keep on the farm. But there has been things that have made my life so much easier by using my phone and technology to run my business. It has helped make things more organized, things run more smoothly and just.
overall better. And so today on the podcast, I am telling you about five apps that I absolutely cannot live without on the farm, plus how I use them. And number five is my favorite. I'm saving the best for last. And I'm going to be talking a lot about my most favorite app that we use on the farm. So let's just dive right into my favorite apps on the farm. The first one is
Well, actually, let me just get this out of the way. The first app that I use hands down every day, multiple times a day are my weather apps. So I'm sure you as a flower farmer also have a bunch of weather apps on your phone. I'm not including this in my five apps that I can't live without, but this is just like a no brainer. So I would just want to throw it in there.
AccuWeather is my favorite weather app. It seems to be the most accurate around here where I live. And I think that changes depending on where you are. But I also have a weather channel app, like the Google Weather app, which I don't love. I don't think it's very accurate. The NOAA and the NOAA Weather Radar.
So radar is super handy, especially if we are working out in the field and there is a forecast for thunderstorms or for rain, we are always looking at the radar to see where it is, where it's moving. And of course it's not always a hundred percent, but it's super helpful for trying to plan if we're going to be transplanting or doing something out in the hoop houses, which if it's going to be thundering and lightning, we probably shouldn't be outside in the hoop houses. And so.
I assume that you already have a weather app or a few on your phone, but I really like the Noah radar app if you don't have that. But okay, besides weather apps, which obviously we're all looking at all the time, my first out of the five top apps that I use on my farm all the time and I cannot live without is toggle. It's T O G G L. This is toggle track. It is a timer.
So basically this is just a timer on your phone where you can categorize and organize the things and the tasks that you time. So it's a time tracking and timekeeping app where you can keep things organized by crop or by date or by project or whatever you want. So for example, if I am doing a time study on a crop on my farm to see how profitable it is, which I highly recommend all of you do, it is.
essential to be able to track your time and keep track of it in an organized way. So if I go out to wire weed or Lysianthus, as soon as I start the task, you know, go to get the wire weeder, I hit time or hit, hit start on the toggle timer and it will start keeping track of your time. And then you do the task and at the end of the task, you hit stop. It's really simple and easy, but then you can actually.
name the task inside of the app. So I can say, why are we Lysianthus? And it can organize it under the Lysianthus folder or it's a project in the toggle app. So it can be all organized by the crop. So you can pick a crop, like for example, let's say Lysianthus and keep track of all the time that you spend, you know.
starting the seed if you do that or transplanting and weeding, harvesting, and it's all in one place. So you can see the labor hours you're spending on that crop, which is really, really important. If you're looking at certain crops in your farm and trying to see which ones are more profitable and which ones are less profitable. So you can use your timer app on like your iPhone or Android phone. They come with a stopwatch.
So you can also use a physical stopwatch as well. But the problems that I have using the one on my phone, like my iPhone timer is that it doesn't automatically categorize the project or the task for me. Whereas the toggle timer app does, which is really nice. We have also used physical stopwatches to time things before, which is great because you have a physical reminder that's not your phone.
And you don't forget to hit stop when you end your task, but we find that we just sort of like lose them or we forget to bring them out to the field with us. And so we don't always have them on us. And so having our phone is pretty critical. Our phones are always on us, always in our pocket. And it's just makes more sense to use that.
Now, one tip I have for you for using the toggle app on your phone is to just keep your phone open, set down somewhere nearby where you're working. Don't just stick it back in your pocket once you start the timer, because it will be a physical reminder for you to actually go pick up your phone and start, or I mean, stop that timer again. So when you get to your bed of Lysianthus, we're going to keep on this example, and you're going to start wire weeding it. You hit start in your toggle app.
You go and you perform the task away from your phone. You know, I just set it down like on the ground by the top of the bed or something like that. And then when you finish the task, you just come back to your phone, hit stop, type in why are we Lysianthus, whatever, save it, and then you're done. And this is for a couple of different reasons. For one, you won't forget to hit the timer when you're done with the task, which I've done so many different times when I tried to use the stopwatch app on my phone.
and not the toggle app. So it's great for that, but also it helps keep you focused on the task that you're doing. So you're not getting distracted by texts or phone calls or checking Instagram or changing the music on your phone or whatever. It's really surprising how much better I stay on task with something. If I just set my phone to the side, I go get focused, get it done really fast, whatever task I'm working on, and then come back to it.
come back to my phone, I mean. So that's just a quick tip for you, but it's toggle. It's T O G G L. It's like a little purple icon. If you go to download it, it's toggle track. They also have a toggle plan app that can help with your task management, which I haven't really used. I've sort of played around with it, but I use a different one that I'm going to talk about, later on in the podcast. So toggle track is the first app that I cannot live without on my farm.
The second app that I can't live without is Evernote. So Evernote is a app for organized note taking. We can use it for our harvest numbers. I take notes on pests and pest management notes of volumes and crop, you know, different crop planning notes for next year, shrink sheets, a whole bunch of different things. So I have the notes app on my iPhone, but I find it very difficult to keep everything.
organized in there because it's just like a giant list of notes. And for whatever reason, it just has never been super organized or really intuitive for me, which is why I really love the Evernote app. And by the way, all the apps I'm talking about today are all totally free. So you don't have to pay for them. Most of them have paid versions of them if you want like more advanced features, but I don't pay for any of them. They're all really great to use without using the paid version.
So Evernote is great because I get to take notes on certain things and keep them organized in folders, especially when I was starting my flower farm, when it was just me working or just me and one other person harvesting. I used to keep track of all of my harvest numbers using Evernote. So I would have a folder for year, let's say 2024. And then I have a folder for every week of the year. So I'd have week, you know,
14, 15, 16, 17, so on and so forth. And if you're not familiar with that system, we plan everything and keep track of everything on our farm by the week number of the year. So the first week in January is week one, and the last week of December is week 52. And I find that's way easier to do everything, all of our crop planning, note taking, harvest numbers.
Then trying to do it by the date. And that way the information is also transferable from year to year because week 13 of 2024 is going to happen at the same time as week 13 and 2025. But anyways, so keeping back to our harvest numbers, I would have a folder for all of the week numbers. And then within the week number folder, I would have an, a note with all of our harvest numbers on it. So Monday of week 15, I would just.
Type in there, as I'm harvesting, I got, okay, 100 bunches of ranunculus. I got 20 bunches of anemones. I got 10 bunches of butterfly ranunculus, whatever. And that way, you just jot it in your phone really quickly as you are doing your harvesting, so you don't have to go back and do it afterwards. It's really efficient to do it that way. And then it's all in one place on your phone, on your app.
Then you can also go on your desktop and you can look at all of the notes on your desktop as well, which I have used to print out before and kind of compare year to years or copy and paste it into a spreadsheet or anything like that. So another thing I love Evernote for is keeping other notes on the farm organized. For example, our pest notes. So I try to keep a folder in Evernote with every month of the year or of our growing season, not really by the year, but...
So for the growing season, I have a month for February, March, April, May. And then when in there, I keep notes on which pests are popping up and how badly they're popping up and what we do to either prevent them from happening or certain programs that we use for pest control. And this is nice because when you start actually keeping notes on these things, it forces you to pay more attention to what's happening on your farm.
And you'll be able to see trends that come up. And so you'll be more prepared to tackle things like pest management and pest issues ahead of time. So an example of this would be Japanese beetles. I think a lot of us are really familiar with those, but Japanese beetles pretty much show up the same week of July every single year or around the same time in July. And I know that because I've kept notes on it over the years, and I've been able to see a trend in my notes.
So I know before early July, every year I need to set out my pheromone traps or do any other sort of beneficial programs that we do for them to keep our Japanese beetles at bay. I also keep notes about different volumes and like a sort of like a shrink sheet. So a shrink sheet is all of the products that we don't use and end up.
being wasted. So this could be something as simple as you keep track of all of the flower bunches and bouquets you compost. So ones that you got ready to sell, you know, brought to the farmer's market or brought somewhere, they didn't end up selling and you threw them away or donated them or whatnot. They didn't get sold. And that's really great to keep a record of that. So, you know, that you are maybe producing too much of that specific crop, or you just shouldn't grow that much of it next year.
So an example of this would be a few years ago, we were growing way too much ajaratum. I just love ajaratum. it's really bright and sunny and happy and like personally, I like it. We use it in our mixed bouquets, but like we don't use it a ton for anything. Really. I just really like it. And I noticed that we weren't really harvesting from the ajaratum bed. And so.
I took a note about it. I said, we grew way too watch at Geratum this year, next year grow less. And same thing if we are selling every single stem and we're like struggling to get certain stems of a particular crop. Like for example, right now we don't have enough snapdragons. So I'm making a note for the future Jenny to look back at this over the winter time and look at my note and say, okay, next year we need to grow more snapdragons during this time.
And so that's also super helpful and all of this can be really organized in Evernote. So if you want to download the Evernote, again, it's free, there's paid versions, but I just use the free one. It's a little white and green app and it's got a little elephant head for the icon. So if you want to go ahead and download that and start using it for organized note taking on your farm, go ahead and do that.
The third app that I like to use on my farm all the time is one called Censored Life. And I am saying this with the caveat that maybe you'll use a similar app to this, but not the same exact one that I have. Censored Life is my alarm system for my temperature and humidity sensors for our greenhouses and our cooler. Now there are tons of different ones that you can use. There's, I mean, there's a million of them, but...
I use Censored Life, which is also Marcell. So Marcell is the device. It's the actual sensor, but the company is called Censored Life. So I use the sensor in my greenhouses and my cooler to keep track of the temperatures and the humidity. And if the temperature dips below 33 degrees in my cooler and is about to freeze all of my flowers, it sends an alarm to my phone.
I have like this crazy horn that goes off and it sends me a text message as well. And there's all these different settings you can have, but it's super handy if you have, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of product in your cooler in your greenhouse and you know, the fans don't turn on and your sides don't open or your cooler goes on the fritz and it freezes or, you know, something happens and ruins all of your flowers. So this is an essential tool on the farm.
Absolutely essential. Ask me how I know. we had a cheap beverage cooler that I used when I first started my flower farm, cause I didn't want to pay for a walk -in cooler at first. And it froze a bunch of wedding florals I had like the night before a wedding and it was devastating. The cooler had just got on the fritz. And if I had had one of these sensors.
with an alarm system, it would have alarmed me and I probably would have been able to get the flowers out of there before they were frozen and what to save the day and save me from losing a lot of money and a huge headache in really, really stressful situation. We use Marcel and Censored Life because you don't need internet for it to work.
A lot of the alarm systems and the sensors for temperature and humidity require internet or wifi. And we do, well, we sort of have wifi on the farm now, but for up until, let's see, up until this spring, actually, we did not have any internet or wifi on our farm. And we just recently beamed internet from our house down to our studio. But like I said, we just did it a few months ago. But this is key because.
Marcell and Censored Life can operate without the internet, which is what I needed when I purchased it a few years ago. So if you are someone who is looking into these sensors and you don't have Wi -Fi or internet where your flower fields or your cooler is, look up Marcell and Censored Life and it's pretty affordable. It's like a yearly subscription fee and it...
sort of acts like a phone or like a cell phone subscription, because it actually uses cell towers to work and alarm you. And it's pretty affordable for it being a pretty essential item for the farm. So that is my third app on my phone that I cannot live without on the farm. The fourth one is Canva.
So if you don't know what Canva is, it is basically a graphic design tool that I actually prefer to use a lot on my desktop, but I have the app on my phone and I use it all the time for marketing stuff. So this is an app that you can basically take one of your flower photos or any branding photos you have for your farm, stick it in the app and you can add.
text and pictures, or whatever to post on Instagram. You can use it for promotions for flyers. And this graphic design tool makes graphic design super easy. It's like graphic design for dummies, which is what I need because I am not talented or have any skills in graphic design whatsoever. It's totally free. They do have paid versions. If you want to put like your branding colors and stuff in there.
I have a paid version for trademark farmer, but not for trademarks flower farm. And so it's totally doable without the paid version. I use it a ton for email images. So if I'm writing an email and I'm doing some kind of promotion on the farm, I will take a really pretty picture of the flowers I'm trying to sell and jazz it up in Canva. So I use it for that. I use it for this podcast, a ton of stuff with trademark farmer.
promotions on Instagram and Facebook. And it's great because you can design something on your computer and then you can download it right to your photos album on your phone using the app on your phone. So if you haven't checked into Canva, it's a really amazing tool. They have a ton of templates on there that you can use too. So if you're trying to use a template for like a flyer or a coupon code or a promotion, you can just type it in to Canva.
into their search box and they'll give you all of these different templates that you can use. You can even search for promotion for floral business or flower promotion, and it'll give you like a themed, template that you can use. And you can just drag and drop your own pictures or your own branding or your own fonts into it. And it works really great. So love Canva use it all the time on my phone. Now the final.
that I absolutely love and use every single day, all day, is Asana. It's A -S -A -N -A, Asana. And this is a task management app for businesses. It is my favorite, favorite, most favorite app ever. We use it for everything. We use it for farm task management, assigning tasks to our team members and to myself.
to -do lists, tracking harvest numbers. So I know I said earlier that I used to use Evernote. Now we actually use Asana for this, but still use Evernote for other things. Note taking, scheduling, it is the best management tool and it's really simple to use. There is a desktop and an app version and I use the desktop version a lot, but it also integrates with toggle track on your desktop, which is really nice. So if you want to keep...
track of let's say how much time you're spending answering emails or invoicing or something like that. When you start it on your computer, you just hit start and it'll keep track with it during your tasks and you hit stop and it keeps all that information right inside of Asana. But the thing that I use the app for the most on my farm is when I'm assigning tasks to myself and my team members and I'm creating schedules for the week. So this is
absolutely huge for time management on the farm, which is massive, massive, massive, massive. Well, I could probably do 10 episodes on time management on the farm. But anyways, I will just be walking around the farm, you know, multiple times a day, but, or all day really. And as I'm walking around or if I'm doing something and I see something that needs to be done, I just whip up, up my phone, open Asana and type it in as a to -do list item in Asana.
And then I can assign that task to either myself. So I have a reminder that I need to do it at some point, or I can assign it to somebody else. I can also put a due date in there. So if there's a task that needs to be done by a certain time, we have a due date. And then I can also prioritize it by high priority, medium priority, and low priority. And this is so freaking amazing, you guys, when you have a team. So whether you have employees that are working for you right now, or you don't.
It's a great way for you to keep track of to -dos on the farm and you can sort it and see what needs to be done right away and what can wait till later. So just organizing all of the millions of things to do on a farm is just so great to do in a sauna. You can also...
kind of categorize things and you can have sections for different to do's on the farm. So I'll have a section for field work. I'll have a section for office work. I'll have a section for content. I'll have a section for bucket list. That's actually a section for things that I want to do on the farm someday, eventually like winter projects that I want to do. And I put everything in there so it doesn't get forgotten about. And this is just, I cannot say enough good things about the app. It's.
been fantastic. We started using it in 2020. Now I can't remember either 2022 or 2023. So we've been using it for a couple of years and I wish I started it a million years ago because when it was just me without this app, I really feel like it's a part of me now because I use it so much. I was just writing to do lists on pieces of paper. I was losing them.
When I had people working for me, I would like hand them a piece of paper with a to -do list for the day. And then like, it would get wet or it'd fall in a bucket of flowers and then it would fall apart. And then they'd be like, what was I supposed to do again? And I'd be like, let me text you. So you have it in your phone. And then it was just, I was a mess. The farm was a mess, but now everyone has access to this app on our team. So all of your team members have their own like account where they can log in and it's just the absolute best. So.
As far as task management goes, it's great for your to -do list and assigning tasks and scheduling things. But we also keep track of our harvest numbers in there now. So this might be like, it's pretty much the same thing as using Evernote, like I talked about earlier. so you could either use Evernote or you can use this and we just set up a whole project for harvest within Asana and we organize it by the week and by the day, just like how I talked about, we use it, used to use it in Evernote.
So it's another option for you to use as well. And this is just absolutely the best thing ever. So if you want to download Asana, there is a free version that you can use. And again, it's A -S -A -N -A. And the little icon is three little orange dots. So if you go to the app store, you can see three orange dots and it's called Asana. So there you have it. There are my five and six, if you want to count the weather app, favorite.
apps to use on the farm that I absolutely can't live without that I use all the time every day. And I highly recommend that you go ahead and download and try some of these ones out, especially toggle, which is the time tracking app and Asana for note taking and assigning tasks, task management and to do lists.
They're all free, amazing to use and can help make your life so much better. Now, even though I use these apps on my phone, I still am that old fashioned girl and have paper records. Like our records that we use for our farmers market sales are still all in paper. I still keep track of a lot of different things, just in notebooks and whatever, because I love the tactileness of pen and paper. I have a paper planner, even though I have like a Google calendar as well. I'm just...
that kind of person. So if you are like me, I'm not telling you that you have to give up paper and pen stuff because I get a lot of joy from it. I loved writing growing up. I loved taking notes. Like I've always been like a big list maker with pen and paper and you don't have to give it up. You can still keep all of that stuff, but using these apps and this technology can make your life so much better. If you have any apps that you love to use on your phone, I would love to hear about them.
Send me a message on Instagram at Trademark Farmer. Let me know what your favorite apps are to use. Maybe we can share them with other people and that would be amazing.
And one last final bit of business here. If you got any value out of this podcast, if you enjoyed it, if you learned something new, please do me a huge solid and go leave this podcast a review. I know it can be a little bit of an ask, but I've been putting tons of time and effort into putting these podcasts together and I love doing them and I'll keep on doing them, but it would just mean the world to me if you could go take less than 30 seconds.
go to Apple Podcasts and leave a quick review. It would just make my entire day if you did that. And if you've already left a review, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. It means the world to me. So hope this helped, gave you guys some good ideas, some good tips, and I am really excited to talk to you in the next podcast episode. So make sure you're subscribed and you don't miss it, and I will talk to you next time. See you then.
