Open data · CC BY 4.0
The Plant Database, Free — Every Crop We Have, and the 500 Most-Searched Varieties
153 food crops with their full care data, plus the 500 most-searched varieties of the 3,202 we hold, as one JSON file: what to plant, when to start it, how far apart, how deep, how much sun, how big it gets, whether it lives through your winter, what size pot and when it is ready. A second file records where every value came from — 3,645 of 4,235 cite a named publication, mostly university extension services, and the 590 that do not each say why. Free under CC BY 4.0 — drop your email below and the download starts right away.
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153 crops · 500 varieties · 3,645 of 4,235 crop values sourced · v2026.07.0
SHA-256: 016127912e22830467567119e3ccfbc30c52b1de4fb3a377db400bd422035f84
What this is
Free reference data for anyone growing food on their own. For each of 153 crops: how far apart to space it, how deep to sow, how much sun it wants, how long to maturity, how big it gets, what size container it needs, whether it lives through your winter, what pests and diseases it gets, and when to start it relative to your last frost. Underneath the crops sit 500 named varieties — the most-searched of the 3,202 we hold, each with its type, color, size, whether it is heirloom or a hybrid, and its days to maturity alongside what that figure counts from.
It is the database the plant pages are built from and the one our app reads when it tells you what to do this week. It exists because we needed it and could not buy it.
What is not in it, and how to get the rest
Every crop is here, with its full care data. The variety list is the 500 most-searched of the 3,202 we hold. This is the part a gardener reads on a seed packet. The part our app runs on stayed behind:
| Count | What |
|---|---|
| 856 | growth stages — what the plant is doing, week by week |
| 1,854 | the care actions inside those stages |
| 370 | variety disease resistance |
| 2,052 | variety trait tags |
| 2,222 | the parsed days-to-maturity range (the same number in a form a scheduler can read) |
| 1,099 | variety growth habit and determinacy |
| 872 | years to first harvest, pollination needs and chill hours |
| 872 | variety ripening season, mature height and heat level |
| 2,702 | the other 2702 varieties we hold |
| — | weather alert thresholds, watering rates and soil-temperature sowing gates |
| — | the frost-relative calendar those stages resolve onto |
Those are the parts that only do work inside software — a stage schedule joined to your frost dates, a watering rate joined to a forecast, a temperature that fires an alert. None of them changes what you do with a trowel, and all of them are the expensive half of the work.
If you want the complete record — to research something, to review our work, or to check us properly — ask us for it. We would rather hand it over to somebody who says what it is for than pretend the download is everything.
How complete is it — read this before anything else
Of the 4,235 field-contract values across the 153 crops in this download, 3,645 — 86.1% — carry at least one cited source.
Quote that figure with that sentence attached. The denominator is the 4,235 values the provenance file tracks: one per field-contract entry per crop, counted over the fields this file actually contains. It is not every key in the JSON, it is not the varieties nested under the crops, and it is not sourcing attempts — all three produce different numbers, and so does our internal database, which holds more fields. This is the failure a dataset page is most likely to hand you.
The remaining 590 values — 14% — carry no citation, and each one records why:
| Count | Reason | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 503 | general_knowledge | Nobody publishes it. Row spacing for an uncommon herb, say. We filled it from ordinary horticulture rather than leave a hole. |
| 87 | human_reviewed | A person set it and attached no citation. |
So you never have to guess whether a blank means “not researched”, “not published anywhere”, or “we forgot”. A dataset that is silently incomplete cannot be relied on at any percentage. One that marks each empty cell can.
Where the values come from
876 publications, and the mix is worth seeing rather than being told about:
| Count | Kind | |
|---|---|---|
| 729 | extension | Land-grant universities publishing for growers in their own state. |
| 107 | other | |
| 34 | seed catalog fact | |
| 5 | usda | |
| 1 | wikipedia |
On seed catalogs, plainly. 135 crop-level values cite one. The first version of our own README claimed catalogs were used only for varieties’ own specifications and never for horticultural fact — that was false, and our data is what says so. Where a catalog is the source of a horticultural value, the provenance file names it and you can weigh it yourself.
How it was checked
269 sourcing batches, audited after the fact against the cited sources. 12,374 values re-checked, 191 findings — a rate of 1.54%. Those figures cover our whole sourcing effort, not this download alone — the download is the part of it we publish, and the audit ran over the fields we kept back as well.
128 of those 269 batches name the person or process that audited them. The other 141 record that an audit happened without naming who ran it — so do not read “269 audited” as 269 equally attested. We would rather tell you that than let the number imply more than it holds.
License and citation
CC BY 4.0. Commercial use, redistribution and derivative products are all fine. The underlying facts come from US public-domain and all-rights-reserved publications; bare facts are not copyrightable, and we extract facts, never prose or images. Each source’s own license is recorded in the provenance file.
Using this data? Credit is required by the license — here's the copy-paste, both flavors:
GardenTrack plant database, https://gardentrack.app/data/plant-database/ — derived from US university extension publications. Licensed CC BY 4.0.<a href="https://gardentrack.app/data/plant-database/">GardenTrack plant database</a>, derived from US university extension publications