In short

What it is

Gardener's Almanac is a pocket companion for vegetable gardeners. It is not a spreadsheet and not a reminder app. It is closer to a knowledgeable friend who knows your garden and knows the season.

It is an app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, on the App Store, and it runs in any web browser too. Your gardens are the same in both.

Timing worked out for your ground

Most apps give you a calendar: sow in March, plant out in May. But a month grid is only right for the place it was made for, and a hardiness zone borrowed from another continent is not much better.

Here, each plant is stored as numbers: the warmth a seed needs to germinate, the days from sowing to a first picking, and the cold it will and will not take. No growing description names a month, a season or a zone.

The app combines those numbers with the climate where you garden, and works out the timing from that. The same plant gets 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. It uses the forecast for your own location, not a national average.

It knows that pots dry out in hours where open ground takes days, that a greenhouse never waters itself, and that most of last Tuesday's rain has gone.

You can correct it. Push a finger into the soil and log what you found, and the estimate moves towards what you 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 and photographs. It is a permanent record that spans years and outlives any single planting, not a feed that scrolls away.

That record is the point. It answers "when did the garlic go in last year?", and it makes next season's advice better than this season's.

Gardens are shared

A garden usually has more than one pair of hands. Invite someone by e-mail, and choose what they may do: Can edit lets them log, plan and edit, and Can view lets them see everything and change 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?", not only "was there watering yesterday?".

Let your assistant in

Gardener's Almanac speaks the Model Context Protocol, a standard that lets an AI assistant work with other apps. An assistant you already use can work with your garden directly: what needs doing this week, what is growing where, or logging a harvest you describe to it.

It is a proper implementation with a proper sign-in, offering an assistant the same things the app offers you. It is not an export added afterwards. Connecting an AI Assistant explains how to set it up.

What it costs

Reading and recording are free, always. The plant guide, these articles, your gardens and everything you log in them — every sowing, harvest, note and photograph, every year of it — stay yours to read and export, whatever happens.

What the app works out for you is the part that is paid for. That is the sowing and planting times for your own climate, the watering forecast, and the to-do list.

Your first growing season of it is free, with no card asked for. It starts with your first garden and runs until the growing season closes where that garden is: the real season on your own ground, not a fixed number of days. Settings shows the date once it is worked out.

After that, it is €29.99 a year or €4.99 a month. One subscription covers up to five gardens. Anyone you share a garden with sees its timing and its to-do list along with you, without paying anything themselves.

You can subscribe in the app through Apple, or on the website. On the website, a subscription bought during your free season is first charged when the season ends.

If the price is ever what stands in the way, get in touch and we will make it free. No questions asked, and nothing to prove: growing food should not depend on what you can afford. There is a note about it in Settings, and asking takes one message.

Photo storage

The allowance belongs to whoever owns the garden, so photos anyone adds to a garden you own count towards your limit. Once it is full, no more photos can be added. Nothing already stored is ever removed, hidden or left out of your export.

If you already have more photos than that and pay for a subscription, get in touch and we will sort it out.

What it stores about you

Less than it could. There are no advertising profiles, no ads of any kind, no third-party analytics and no tracking pixels, and nothing about you is sold to anyone. The monitoring that keeps the app running lives on the same servers as the app itself.

The list of devices signed in to your account shows a browser and when it was last used. It deliberately shows no IP address or city: a device you recognise is what you 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, can be found by search engines and can be read without an account. Their text 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.

Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, which passes on forecasts from national weather services; its licence page names them all. For rain, we take the middle of three or four forecasts: Open-Meteo's pick for the place (in the UK and Ireland, DWD's instead), MET Norway's (the one Yr shows), and one or two more that depend on where the garden is. In Sweden that is SMHI's; elsewhere they come from Germany's DWD, NOAA in the United States, or Environment and Climate Change Canada.

The climate averages behind the sowing times, and the rain that has already fallen, come from ERA5, also through Open-Meteo. The credit lines the services ask for:

Why it matters

Growing your own food is one of the most grounded things a person can do. You learn your soil, your microclimate and 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 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.