In short
- Create a garden, add its location if you can, and take the setup guide.
- Add what you grow under Crops, and the Todo tab fills with its reminders.
- Before you water, push a finger 2–3 cm into the soil, then log what you did.
- Sowed before you started? Log it with the real date, and nothing is lost.
- Turn on notifications in Settings to hear when the soil is getting dry.
Before you start
Gardener's Almanac is a record of your garden that runs across seasons. What you log becomes watering advice, sowing and planting hints for your exact location, and a harvest that tracks itself.
Use it in the app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, from the App Store, or in a web browser. Your gardens are the same in both.
You need:
- A name for the garden. One garden is usually right, even for a plot with a greenhouse and pots.
- Its location, if you can give it. The watering advice and the timing hints are worked out from it.
Set up the garden
- Create a garden, and tap Add location (optional) to set where it is.
- Say yes to the setup guide. When the garden is made, the app asks Would you like help getting started? — tap Yes, get this garden started.
- Say where you will grow. The guide then asks what each place's ground looks like now, and what you would rather do about it.
- Pick something to grow, if it offers anything. These are crops that can go in the ground now, where you are.
- Agree to the plan. Add all of this to the to-do list puts its jobs on the to-do list. Nothing is recorded as done until you do it.
You can leave the guide 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 answered is not asked again.
Add what you grow
- Open the garden and go to the Crops tab.
- Tap Add plant, and choose what is in the ground or what you plan to grow.
Each plant you add gets growing tips. The Todo tab fills with its sowing, planting-out and harvest reminders, timed to your garden's location rather than a generic calendar.
Started mid-season? Log what you have done
If you sowed or planted before you set up the garden, don't wait for a reminder that has already passed.
- Open the plant under Crops.
- Tap Log, and log the sowing or planting with the date it really happened.
The app dates the expected harvest from that entry and keeps tracking it, as if the reminder had come on time. Nothing is lost by starting mid-season.
Log watering and soil checks
These two matter most from day to day.
- Push a finger 2–3 cm into the soil before you water.
- If it is dry and crumbly, water it, and log it with Log watering.
- If it is cool and moist, don't water. Log it with Log soil check instead.
Every soil check, watering, sowing, planting and harvest you log stays in the garden's permanent history, under Garden log. Next season you can look back on it, and the season after that.
Does part of the garden dry out faster?
Don't make three gardens out of one. One garden is usually right, even for a plot with a greenhouse at one end and pots at the other.
If one part really is different — a greenhouse that never sees rain, a row of pots that dries in hours — add a growing area for it. Each area gets its own watering advice, and everything else keeps following the garden.
There is no hurry: add one the day you notice one part needing water when the rest doesn't. The setup guide asks about this first, and Add growing area on the garden's page works the same way later. Growing Areas explains them.
How the app knows when to nudge
With a location set, the app uses the weather forecast for the coming week to estimate how fast the soil is drying.
- When the soil looks like it is getting dry, it nudges you.
- When rain is on the way, it stays quiet.
- If you have growing areas, it estimates each one separately, and the nudge names the driest.
Turn on notifications
Once the garden has a location, notifications can tell you when the soil is probably getting dry, and when it is time to sow, plant out or harvest.
- Open Settings.
- Tap Enable push notifications — in the iPhone app, Turn on notifications.
Using the web app on an iPhone? Add it to your home screen first, with Share → Add to Home Screen: Safari only allows notifications from there. Turning On Notifications walks through it.
Why it works
Pace yourself. 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, and carry weight as though you will carry it always. A garden offers more work than one person can finish, so sustainability starts with the person doing the work.
Give back what you take. A garden is not a one-season project: the soil that feeds your carrots this year should be richer next year. That means compost, cover crops and rest — tending the ground as a living thing.
Everything is connected. Biodynamic farmers speak of the "farm organism": a farm is its crops, its trees, its water, its animals and its compost, all one living system. A garden is part of a neighbourhood, a watershed, a planet.
No planet, no garden. No garden, no you.