A garden doesn't wait for you to remember it. The soil dries out on its own schedule, the window for sowing carrots closes whether you noticed or not, and the tomatoes you planted out in May are ready to harvest whether or not you happened to check. Notifications are how Gardener's Almanac taps you on the shoulder at the moment that actually matters, instead of leaving it to chance.
What you'll get
- Check soil & water — a nudge when the weather and your garden's recent history suggest the soil could be drying out. It's a prompt to go check, not a command to water. If you've set up growing areas, it names the one that's driest, so you know which bed to walk to.
- Sow, plant out, and harvest reminders — timed to your garden's exact location using the same climate data behind the Todo tab, not a generic calendar.
- One notification per garden, grouped — if several things become due around the same time, you get a single summary ("Sow carrots, plant out tomatoes, water your garden, and 2 more") instead of a flood of separate pushes. That stays true however many growing areas a garden has: three dry beds are still one nudge, not three.
Install as an app first — required on iPhone
Before you can turn on notifications, add Gardener's Almanac to your home screen. On iPhone this isn't optional: Safari only allows web notifications for pages that have been added to the home screen and opened from there, not for pages open in a regular browser tab.
iPhone (Safari):
- Open the app in Safari.
- Tap the Share icon (the square with an arrow pointing up).
- Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
- From now on, open the app from its home screen icon, not from a Safari tab — that's what makes notifications available.
Android (Chrome):
- Open the app in Chrome.
- Tap the ⋮ menu.
- Tap Install app (or Add to Home screen).
- Open it from the installed icon.
Once installed, the app opens full-screen like any other app on your phone — no address bar, and a proper spot on your home screen.
Turn them on
- Open Settings in the app.
- Enable notifications.
- Allow the permission prompt your browser shows — this is the one-time system dialog asking whether Gardener's Almanac can send you notifications.
You can turn them off again from the same place at any time.
Keep them accurate
Notifications are only as good as what the app knows about your garden. Weather alone gives a reasonable estimate, but logging what you actually do sharpens it: every soil check and watering you log resets the model to reality instead of a guess. In a garden with growing areas the estimate is kept separately for each one, so saying which part you watered sharpens that part — and a watering with no area named counts for all of them, which is usually exactly right. See the Efficient Watering article for how to read your soil before you decide, and Getting Started for what else is worth logging along the way.