Very few gardens are tended by exactly one pair of hands. An allotment gets watered by whoever is passing on a hot Thursday. A household garden has one person who plans and another who actually remembers to pick the beans. A community plot has a rota, and a WhatsApp group, and a running argument about the comfrey.
Gardener's Almanac has no shared accounts, and that's deliberate: a shared login means a shared inbox, a password someone writes on a noticeboard, and a log that can't tell you who did what. Instead you keep your own account and invite other gardeners into a specific garden.
Two kinds of access
When you invite someone you choose one of two things:
- Can view. They see everything — the beds, the plants, the whole log, the to-do list, the watering forecast. They change nothing. Good for a neighbour keeping an eye on the place while you're away, or a landlord who'd like to know the plot is being used.
- Can edit. They can do what you can do day to day: log watering and soil checks, write notes, add and remove plants, record sowing and harvesting, and work the to-do list. Good for anyone actually gardening with you.
You can change your mind at any time, on anyone, including on an invitation that hasn't been accepted yet.
What stays yours
Some things belong to whoever made the garden, and no amount of "can edit" hands them over:
- Renaming it, or moving it to a different location
- Its microclimate — sun, rain, soil, whether it's in the ground or in pots
- Duplicating it
- Deleting it
- Deciding who else gets in
A garden has exactly one owner. Everyone else is a guest in it, however much work they do.
What the person you invite receives
An email, in your language rather than theirs — you're the one who knows who they are, and we have no way to ask them before they've accepted. It names you, names the garden, and carries a link that works once, expires after two weeks, and only works for the address you sent it to. Forwarding it achieves nothing.
They don't need an account first. If the address is new to us, following the link signs them up in the same handful of steps everyone else uses, and then drops them straight into the garden. If they already have an account, the garden simply appears in their list, marked as shared by you.
You'll never be told whether the address you typed already had an account. That isn't an oversight: an invitation form that answered would be a way for anyone to check whether a given person is registered here, one address at a time.
The log remembers who
Everything logged in a shared garden is recorded under the name of whoever logged it, permanently. Not so anyone can be checked up on — so the record makes sense. "Watered" in a garden three people tend is half a fact; you need to know whether it was you this morning or somebody else last night before you decide what to do with the hose.
The garden log is meant to outlast the plants in it and the people tending them. It survives someone being removed, someone leaving, and someone deleting their account entirely. What they did stays where it happened, still attributed. Sharing a garden adds to that record; nothing about it takes anything away.
Ending it
Either side can. As the owner, open Share garden and remove anyone in the list; their access stops immediately. As a guest, open the garden and choose Leave garden. In both cases everything already logged stays exactly where it is, and the owner can invite the person again later — nothing was detached, so nothing needs re-attaching.
What this isn't, yet
Worth being straight about the edges:
- Notifications are still yours alone. If you share a garden with someone, they see the same watering guidance and to-dos you do when they open the app, but reminders go to the owner. That's a gap we intend to close, not a decision.
- Ownership can't be handed over yet. For a garden that outlives whoever created it — an allotment association whose secretary changes every other year, say — that matters, and it's the next thing being built for sharing.
- This isn't a community garden feature. There's no public garden, no browsing other people's plots, and no way in except being invited by name. Some of that may come; none of it is here.
If you're setting up a garden with someone for the first time, Getting Started covers what's worth logging, and Efficient Watering explains the guidance you'll both be reading.