Almost nobody gardens in one uniform place. There's the bed that bakes all afternoon and the one behind the shed that never quite dries out. There's a greenhouse that hasn't seen rain since it was built, and a row of pots by the door that needs water twice on a hot day when the beds are perfectly happy.
A growing area is how you tell the app about that. It's a named part of a garden — Greenhouse, Raised bed, Pots by the door — with its own conditions and its own watering advice, inside the one garden you already have.
When you want one, and when you don't
Most gardens don't need any. If your plot dries out at roughly the same rate all over, one garden with one set of conditions describes it perfectly, and adding areas would give you more things to tap and no better answers. A garden with no areas behaves exactly as it always has.
Add one when a part of your garden is genuinely different in a way that changes what you should do:
- It gets no rain. A greenhouse, a polytunnel, a covered patio. This is the big one — a rain-protected area can never water itself, so it needs telling apart from ground that does. A greenhouse or polytunnel has its own answer rather than sharing the covered patio's, because a cover cuts the light that drives drying as well as keeping the rain off.
- It holds water differently. Pots dry in hours; a raised bed of good loam takes days; heavy clay in the ground takes longer still.
- It gets a different amount of sun. The strip along the north fence is not the open middle.
If two parts of the garden differ only in what's planted in them, they're not separate areas. They're just two crops in one place.
Conditions are inherited, and you override the differences
An area starts out as a copy of the garden's own growing conditions, and only differs where you say it does. When you set one up you'll see each condition — sun, rain, soil, whether it's in the ground, in a raised bed or in containers — offering Same as the garden alongside the actual choices.
Leave everything alone and the area behaves exactly like the rest of the garden. Change only what's actually different — for a greenhouse that's usually greenhouse or polytunnel, and nothing else — and the rest keeps following the garden. Change the garden's soil type later and every area that never overrode it moves with it.
This is deliberately the opposite way round from filling in a form. You're not describing each area from scratch; you're describing how it differs from the place it's in, which is both less typing and a more honest picture of a garden.
Watering advice, per area
This is where areas earn their keep. The app estimates how fast your soil is drying by combining the weather where you are with what you've logged doing — the model is described in Efficient Watering — and with areas, it runs that estimate separately for each one.
A greenhouse gets no rain and dries steadily; the bed outside it gets watered by every shower. Told apart, they produce two different answers, and the one that says "check this" is the one that's actually dry. Your garden's headline still names a single place: the driest area that needs doing something about. One garden, one nudge, and now it can tell you which bed.
Two things are worth knowing about how the log feeds this. Watering with no area named counts as watering everything — because it usually was. And an area you create today isn't born parched: it calibrates from the garden-wide waterings you've already logged, so it starts from what you actually did rather than from nothing.
Saying where you sowed
When you sow, plant out or harvest, you can name the area. Do it a few times and the app starts being able to answer a question it couldn't before: what has been grown here.
Each area keeps its own list of what's gone into it and what came out, drawn from the log rather than from a field on the plant. That matters because a crop isn't in one place: carrots sown under glass in April and outdoors in May are one planting in two areas, on two schedules, with two harvests coming. Your plants list shows exactly that — each place, and the next thing due in each.
Harvests follow the sowing they came from. If two sowings could be the one you're picking, the app asks which — naming each by date and place, because "sown 6 April · greenhouse" and "sown 11 May · raised bed" are two beds you recognise where two dates are just arithmetic. Whichever you pick, the harvest is filed where that crop was growing. You're never asked twice.
Nothing is lost if you change your mind
Delete an area and its log survives. Every entry recorded there stays in the garden log, still with its date, its note and its photos — it simply goes back to being about the garden as a whole, as does anything still on your to-do list for that spot. The log is meant to outlast the plants in it and the way you happened to organise them.
The same is true in reverse: nothing has to be decided up front. Start with one garden, add an area the day you put up the greenhouse, and everything logged before that carries on counting.
Efficient Watering explains the drying estimate itself, and Getting Started covers what's worth logging in the first place.