Custom Land Designer for computer!!!

I bought this program for my computer that allows me to plan out my landscaping and see what it would look like!! Just add a pic of your house and you can add/move/remove anything you want. And you can take a virtual walk thru your property!!
They have thousands of plants that you can add to see if you like it before you plant it!! You can add trellis fences statues the list goes on and on.
I also found that it calmed my desire to go out and jackhammer the ground and try to plant things!!
Its extremely helpful if your doing major changes and arent sure what you want to do. You can even add extensions to your house!
Comes in 3 CDs and one of them is a complete garden encyclopedia!
Well, back to virtual planting around my virtual pool!!
Janice

HI Janice,
I also have one of those prgrams and it's very useful to "grow" plants and see how they will look at different times of the year and with age. My program is 3D Landscape by Sierra Home. I must have rearranged my garden hundreds of times on this program and I built our addition with the click of a mouse..lol. Somewhere on the internet, though, is a free garden 3D planner, also. I thought I had it bookmarked but I don't. If I find it, I'll post the link.
Trish

I've been playing around with something called Garden Designer. Freebie with a computer mag. Got it at the weekend. THe design side isn't terribly great tho it's quite fun to move the little gardener man around. The encyclopaedia's quite nice - just wish it was bigger tho.

They had a free online one at Garden.com and then Garden.com got taken over by Burpee.com and they do not have this feature. I e-mailed them.Because they have my file, of my design. I am hoping they will bring it back.

Michele..that was the free one I was thinking of at Garden.com
I hope you can retrieve your work :)
Trish

I had stuff at Garden.com, too. In fact, I e-mailed them some comments on features I thought would make the site easier to use, and got back a really nice reply from them, saying they were planning a Version 2, yada yada yada.

Then I saw where Garden.com was shutting down all operations, not just the retail stuff, and then the Burpee announcement hit, and that's the last I saw of my design.

I picked up the LandDesigner 3D from SierraHome at Best Buy a couple weeks ago. It was $19.99 and had a $20 rebate form attached - the next best thing to free, right? It is pretty cool, and has a lot of plants, even some offbeat ones that I wouldn't have thought it would have (it integrated with Garden.com before the website changed to Burpee's home page.) But it is a good, easy-to-use program, if anybody's looking for one.

Trish
Thats the same one I got. Lots of fun. LOL.....we have nosey neighbors on the right side of us who likes to sit up high in his boat(in the driveway) and peer into the yard. We made sure to add him into our scene..as we wanted it to be "true to life". Ha ha. Had many laughs and enjoyment with that little treasure.
Janice

Minnie..don't you just love those crunching leaf sounds when you walk around your virtual garden..lol.
Trish

Maybe I could go to Best Buy online.
I actually has crunching leaf sounds when you walk around the garden? No kidding? How cool . Have to check it out.

Yep, you hear the virtual "person" "walking" around.....it's pretty cool.

I bypassed the tutorial (not wise, but I think the question "how hard can it be?" has gotten me in more trouble over the years than any other.....

Anyway, here's a "lesson learned": when I started adding items - plants, decks, arbors, ponds....I couldn't figure out how to zoom in and "see" them, and they were so tiny. It took me a while to realize that "zoom" was under "window".

When I finally found the zoom function, I had to laugh - I had stuff piled on top of each other, stairs going the wrong way, you name it. But you can keep zooming in until it's big enough to sort everything out. They probably covered that in the tutorial, but in case somebody else has my bad habit of "cutting to the chase", I thought I'd pass along that tip!

Hi. We just got the same software package. It's pretty cool. The only thing I don't like about it is that if you want the full 3D option you actually have to "build" your house and property lines into the program. Mr Funbug spent half the day on Saturday measureing stuff and it still looks like our yard is too big. We'll be playing with it more next weekend.

Welcome to DG, Funbug! I guess I didn't have to do much measuring since we just bought our house last year (and we've spent a lot of time working on it.) The rough dimensions of property and house were pretty fresh in my mind. And I know exactly where the property plat is filed: right next to the septic system layout, which had to be resurrected last month - ugh!!!! Hope you have fun playing with the software!!!

My yard also looks to big. Not sure if my son who helped me put the wrong footage in but it looks pretty darn impressive. Do love the sound effects!! I do have a question for anyone who has mastered it. How do you spin things around???? I wanted to put some stairs going down from the deck and it goes the wrong way. Same with my trellis, a boat, and several other things.
I did laugh (sorry) about the zooming in. I did the same exact thing.!! It sure is fun learning.
Minnie

Minnie...I just about fell out of my chair laughing when I read that you included your nosy neighbor. Love your sense of humor!

We have Land Designer by Sierra Home and we had no problem building our house and property lines. Our problem was that it would only let us have one door to the house. We put the door in the back because that is where most of our gardening/deck plans are, but when you zoom to the front of our house it looks really stupid without a front door. LOL

Hey, Minnie....I'm so glad I'm not the only one. Here's what I finally figured out. Zoom in on the object until it's big enough to see ALL the details (for some things, you may have to get them almost full-screen sized, but you have to be able to see the arrows around the object. Click on the object, and you'll see the arrows pointing every which way (which let you stretch and move the object.) Somewhere among all those arrows, you'll find a dot. When you click on it, it gets encircled by two arrows. Drag it, and it SHOULD let you rotate the object around. Hope that helps, and let me know if you need more help (but remember this help is from the person who bypassed the tutorials!!!!)

Maybe we can work out a trade on neighbors when we get ready to trade pond plants - I'll trade you the nosy neighbor for ours, who is convinced that ALL her problems began when we moved in this house. Must be nice to have lived 50-some years without any problems....bummer to have 'em hit this late in life, huh? Honest to gosh, that's what she told us during one of her rantings.....I'm hoping she'll convince herself she really needs to move somewhere else!

Carol7, my version let me put as many doors and windows (and arches and ponds) as I wanted in - and I ended up with a dozen or so my first time out (didn't follow the tutorial, everything was teeny-tiny, and I just kept clicking and adding....) Now as I recall, by my third or fourth attempt, I started to get the hang of it, and I ended up putting the back door while in 3-D mode, rather than the top-down view (while I was viewing the back side of the house, I clicked on "house wizard", and started dropping in the doors and windows I needed for the back and sides of the house).....so maybe there's hope for your front door yet????

Go_vols...Thanks so much for the tips. I may not have a front door right now, but I have all of my windows to look out of. LOL If I can't figure this out I'll just remember "Back door friends are the best".
Carol

I couldnt even find windows!!!!! Which in my case is pretty important as my house has 21 windows and its less than 800 square feet small. I did have a front door and a back door but it turned out a little cockeyed when I realized I had to raise the house 3 feet off the ground but the DOOR stayed at ground level!! lol!! I just overlook it. I just see what I want to see.
Go....no way about that trade. Finally got him to where he thinks I am a crazy,nasty "B"!! I stopped being friendly and he kept coming up to me asking if I was mad at him. (He put a bench by the stockade fence and kept popping his head over the STOCKADE FENCE HE ASKED US TO GO IN HALFS WITH HIM!!) Only when I was in the front yard would I be nice. we also went in halfs for a 20 dollar wheelbarrell (his idea) that I never even saw! Used to ask my hubby to go to Home Depot so he could carry the heavy things. Hubby put heat in his basement (for a case of Budweiser he so generously purchased in leau of money) Put in outside sprinklers (free-no beer this time) LOL. This all happened within the first 8 months of living here.
Nope....no thanks. Peeking over our fence is nothing now. Maybe this year when it warms up we will give him something to look at!!!LOL
Minnie

Hmmmm. I don't know if I'd recommend giving him an eyeful this summer - something tells me that might make the problem worse! If you won't trade, I guess that means we'll have to keep our neighbor. She doesn't peep at us, although I'm not sure that glaring is any better. She tried demanding that we pay half the cost for a privacy fence between our properties that she now feels a need for, but we didn't bite on that one.

This is the first time we have had bad relations with a neighbor, and it is so depressing and stressful. But maybe when she puts up that big ole fence, I'll be able to pretend that somebody friendly lives over there!

This message was edited Thursday, Mar 8th 10:52 PM