Gardener's Almanac is a season-spanning record of your garden. What you log becomes watering advice, sowing and planting hints for your exact location, and a harvest that tracks itself. Create a garden, add a location if you can, and start with the guide.
Start with the setup guide
Making a garden ends with an offer to walk through it, and taking that offer is the shortest way in. It asks where you will be growing, then what each place's ground looks like now and what you would rather do about it. It ends with a plan you agree to, and the jobs on that plan go onto your to-do list — nothing is recorded as done until you do it.
It also offers a few crops that can go in the ground now, where you are.
None of it is compulsory and you can leave at any step. If you skipped it, or you are reading this later, it is waiting on your garden's page and picks up where you left off — whatever you have already told it is not asked about again.
1. Add the plants you're growing
Open the Plants tab and add what's in the ground (or what you're planning). Adding a plant unlocks growing tips for it, and turns on the Todo tab: personalised sowing, planting-out, and harvest reminders timed to your garden's location, not a generic calendar.
Does your garden dry out unevenly?
One garden is usually the right answer, even for a plot with a greenhouse at one end and pots at the other — don't make three gardens out of one. If part of it is genuinely different, though — a greenhouse that never sees rain, a row of containers that dries in hours — add a growing area for it. Each one gets its own watering advice, and everything else keeps following the garden. It can wait: add areas the day you notice one part needing water when the rest doesn't.
This is the first thing the setup guide asks about, so if you took it you have probably answered already. Adding one later, from the garden's own page, works exactly the same way.
2. Starting mid-season? Log what you've already done
If you're setting this garden up after sowing or planting has already happened, don't wait for a reminder that's already passed — log the sowing or planting from the plant's own page. The app dates the expected harvest from that log and keeps tracking it, exactly as if the reminder had fired on time. Nothing is lost by starting mid-season.
What to log, and why it matters
The two things that matter most day-to-day are soil checks and watering. Before you water, push a finger a couple of centimetres into the soil. If it's dry and crumbly — water it and log the watering. If it feels cool and moist — log a soil check instead and come back tomorrow.
With a location set, the app uses the five-day weather forecast to estimate how fast your soil is drying. When it looks like the soil is getting thirsty, it will nudge you. When rain is on the way, it will stay quiet. If you've set up growing areas, that estimate runs separately for each of them, and the nudge names the one that's driest.
Every soil check, watering, sowing, planting, and harvest you log stays in your garden's permanent history — a diary you can look back on next season, and the season after that.
Turn on notifications
Once your garden has a location, turn on notifications in Settings so the app can tell you when the soil is likely getting thirsty, and when it's time to sow, plant out, or harvest. On an iPhone, add the page to your home screen first (Share → Add to Home Screen) — that one extra step is what makes notifications possible on iOS. See the Turning On Notifications article for the full walkthrough.
Work as if you will work forever
John Jeavons, in How to Grow More Vegetables, describes a Japanese piece of wisdom for sustainable farming: dig as though you will dig for the rest of your life. Carry weight as though you will carry it always. A garden offers more work than any one person can finish — there will always be another row to weed, another patch to turn. Sustainability starts with the person doing the work: pace yourself.
The garden across seasons
A garden is not a one-season project. The soil that feeds your carrots this year should be richer next year. That means giving back what you take — compost, cover crops, rest. Tend the ground as a living thing.
Everything connected
Biodynamic farmers speak of the farm organism: a farm is not just its crops but its trees, water, animals, and compost — one living system. A garden is part of a neighbourhood, a watershed, a planet.
No planet, no garden. No garden, no you.