Gardener's Almanac is a pocket companion for vegetable gardeners. Not a spreadsheet, not a reminder app — something closer to a knowledgeable friend who knows your garden and knows the season.
There is no shortage of gardening apps. Here is what this one does differently.
Timing worked out for your ground
Most apps hand you a calendar: sow in March, plant out in May. Whose March? A month grid is only ever right for the place it was drawn for, and a hardiness zone borrowed from another continent is not much better.
Here, plants are 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 — and none of the growing descriptions mention a month, a season or a zone. The timing is worked out by combining those numbers with the climate where you actually garden. The same plant gives the right answer in Palermo and in Luleå.
Watering from real weather, and from your own hands
The app keeps a running estimate of how much moisture is left in each of your growing areas, fed by the forecast for your own location rather than a national average. It knows that pots dry in hours where open ground takes days, that a greenhouse never waters itself, and that last Tuesday's rain has mostly gone.
It also listens to you. When you push a finger into the soil and log what you found, that reading pulls the estimate back towards what you actually felt. The one instrument that has never let a gardener down is the gardener, standing in the garden.
A record that outlives the season
Everything you do is kept: sowing, planting out, watering, soil checks, weeding, harvests, notes, photographs. Not an activity feed that scrolls away, but a permanent record that spans years and outlives any single planting.
That record is the point. It is what answers "when did the garlic go in last year?", and it is what makes next season's advice better than this season's.
Gardens are shared, properly
A garden usually has more than one pair of hands. You can invite someone by e-mail and give them either the run of the place or a look at it: a writer can log, plan and edit, while a reader sees everything and changes nothing. The garden stays yours either way.
Every entry in the log records who made it, so a shared garden answers "did anyone water yesterday?" rather than just "was there watering yesterday?".
Let your assistant in
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. It is a proper implementation with a proper sign-in, offering an assistant the same things the app offers you, rather than an export bolted on afterwards.
Connecting an AI Assistant explains how to set it up.
What it stores about you
Less than it could. No advertising profiles, no ads of any kind, no third-party analytics, no tracking pixels, and nothing about you sold to anyone. The monitoring that keeps the app running lives on the same servers as the app itself.
Even the small things go that way. The list of devices signed in to your account shows you a browser and when it was last used, and deliberately not an IP address or a city — a device you recognise is what you actually need to see, and the rest is personal data there is no good reason to hold.
The Privacy Policy is the whole of it, in plain language.
Where the knowledge comes from
The growing information here was compiled from seed merchants who publish careful cultivation notes — among them Runåbergs Fröer, Lindbloms Frö, Nordfrö and Johnny's Selected Seeds — and from Wikipedia. Every plant page credits and links the sources behind it, and the shops are linked from the plants their work informed. Sending buyers to the people this rests on is the least we can do.
We give our own work away on the same terms. Plant pages are public, indexable and readable without an account, and the text on them is licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse it, commercially if you like, and credit it. How to grow, harvest, cook and keep a crop belongs to gardening rather than to us.
Why it matters
Growing your own food is one of the most grounded things a person can do. It builds a kind of resilience that is hard to abstract: you learn your soil, your microclimate, your seasons. You become a little less dependent on systems you cannot see or influence.
Every garden — even a small one — is part of something larger. A garden in good shape holds water, feeds insects, and keeps genetic variety alive in ways that industrial supply chains cannot. Tending yours is a quiet contribution to biodiversity and a healthier planet.
Made by Olof Montin
Gardener's Almanac is a one person project, with a focus on food production, resilience, and sustainability. Small on purpose. Built with care.
It runs on rented machines in the EU, and sends its e-mail through an EU provider. It has spoken English and Swedish since its first line of code, rather than being translated afterwards.
How this is made. I build Gardener's Almanac with an AI coding assistant. It writes much of the code; I decide what gets built, what doesn't, and why — and those decisions are written down in the open. What it does not do is invent gardening facts. Every plant here is compiled from named seed merchants who publish careful cultivation notes, credited and linked on the plant's own page. Where a source gave no figure, the assistant estimated one, and every estimate is marked as such in the data the calculations read. The watercolour images are generated with an AI image tool — illustrations rather than photographs, with no real garden or person pictured — and the words are written and edited by hand. If any of that changes, this paragraph changes with it.
Questions, corrections, or something that ought to work better? contact@gardeners-almanac.app.