How a Green Thumb Is Helping This Entrepreneur Earn Greenbacks Smart Gardener brings ag-biz tech to the backyard.

Not long after planting her first vegetable garden, Kristee Rosendahl realized she was spending most of her time indoors researching gardening topics, not actually digging in the dirt.

"I had a stack of gardening books a mile high, but it wasn't helping me figure out what was best for my garden," she recalls. Her need for a hyperlocal resource led Rosendahl, a user-experience designer at Apple, to develop Smart Gardener, an online tool for planning and managing one's vegetable patch.

Users enter their ZIP code, garden size and household size, and the program aggregates historical weather statistics from a national database to make recommendations for the best vegetables for the climate and when to plant. It also provides a week-to-week guide for maintaining one's garden through the growing season.