Gardener's Almanac: Grow Food

Sowing, planting and watering times worked out for your own ground, not printed from a calendar. You say where your garden is, once, and the timing comes from that place's own climate, anywhere in the world.

NOT A ZONE, NOT A FROST DATE Most garden apps time your sowing from a hardiness zone, or from a frost date you have to look up yourself. Here every plant is stored as numbers: the warmth a seed needs to germinate, the days from sowing to a first picking, the cold it will and will not take. Combined with the climate at your garden, the same plant gives the right answer in Palermo and in Luleå.

WATERING FROM REAL WEATHER, AND FROM YOUR OWN HANDS Each growing area keeps its own soil moisture estimate, fed by the forecast where your garden is. Pots dry in hours where open ground takes days, and a greenhouse never waters itself. Push a finger into the soil and log what you felt, and the estimate follows you rather than the other way round.

A RECORD THAT OUTLIVES THE SEASON Sowing, planting out, watering, weeding, harvests, notes and photographs are kept as a permanent record that spans years, not a feed that scrolls away. It answers "when did the garlic go in last year?", and it is what makes next season's advice better than this season's.

GARDENS WITH MORE THAN ONE GARDENER Invite someone by email as a writer, who can log, plan and edit, or as a reader, who sees everything and changes nothing. Every entry records who made it, so a shared garden answers "did anyone water yesterday?" rather than just "was there watering yesterday?". Built for households, allotments and community gardens.

YOUR OWN AI ASSISTANT, LET IN There is no chatbot built in. Instead, Gardener's Almanac speaks the Model Context Protocol, so an AI assistant you already use can work with your garden directly: what needs doing this week, what is growing where, logging a harvest by describing it.

NOTHING ABOUT YOU FOR SALE No ads of any kind, no advertising profiles, no third-party analytics and no tracking pixels. Your email address and where your garden is are all it knows about you, and you typed both in yourself. It runs on servers in the EU and sends its email through a European provider.

MADE BY ONE PERSON, IN SWEDEN I'm Olof Montin: software engineer, allotment grower and father. I build Gardener's Almanac on my own, small on purpose. I've written software since the mid-nineties, when we still dialled up the internet over the phone line, and I've wanted to build this app ever since I qualified as a gardener in 2011, after three years of training in biodynamic horticulture.

I build it with an AI coding assistant. It writes much of the code; I decide what gets built, how, what doesn't, and why. It doesn't invent gardening facts: every plant and article is compiled from seed merchants who publish careful cultivation notes and from public research, all credited and linked on the plant's page or in the article. Where a source gave no figure, the assistant estimated one, and every estimate is marked. The watercolour illustrations come from an AI image tool.

— Olof

YOUR FIRST SEASON, FREE Start your first garden before 1 January 2027 and your whole first growing season is free, with no card asked for. Start later, and the first two months of your growing season are free. After that, what the app works out for you — the timing, the watering forecast and the to-do list — needs a subscription, monthly or yearly, and the price is shown in the app. The plant catalogue, the knowledge articles and your own garden records stay free, always, and everything you have logged remains yours to read and to export. If money is tight, get in touch and it is free. Growing food shouldn't depend on your bank balance.

Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Privacy Policy: https://gardeners-almanac.app/articles/privacy

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