Help

Anyone can make a free GardenTrack account with their email. If you’d like every paid feature free while you help us test, you can join the beta at gardentrack.app/beta, and an invite code still works if you were sent one. This page covers how the beta works and what each sign-in message means.

The first time you open GardenTrack, a short interview asks about you and your place, builds a free plan for your first spot, then makes your account with your email. Start your garden over later and a shorter setup asks where you garden and takes one plant. Here is what each does with your answers.

GardenTrack asks which variety of a crop you planted, because a Sungold and a Cherokee Purple ripen weeks apart. Three honest answers when you add a plant — pick one, say you're not sure, or type the name — plus two that need no tapping at all: photograph the seed packet, or just say it in a chat about a plant you already have.

Where the app's numbers come from, how much of it is sourced, and how to download the crop and variety data free.

What happens when you tap Add to my garden while reading, where those plants are kept, and the button that carries them into the app and sets your garden up around them.

Came home with seven trees? Photograph each nursery label and GardenTrack reads the crop, the variety and the rootstock off it, then shows you everything it read before a single plant is saved. Here is what it reads, what it does when a label will not read, and why nothing is written until you have looked.

Tap the + in the middle of the bar, tap what happened, then tap the plants it happened to. Watered, fed, picked, saw a pest, looked it over, or wrote a note. Several plants at once if you watered a whole bed. No typing unless you want to, and no AI involved at any point.

GardenTrack asks whether each plant is in a tray, a pot, a bed or the ground. It is the single biggest input into how often it tells you to water — and it keeps asking until you answer.

Tap Look beside any crop while you are adding a plant and you get one answer: can this go in your garden this week, based on your own frost dates. Then a button that brings you straight back with it chosen.

A single button in your profile deletes every plant, bed, journal entry, photo and reminder you have, and leaves your account signed in. It is meant for starting over from scratch. Here is exactly what goes, what stays, and why there is no undo.

The Talk tab is a chat, in the shape you already know from every other chat app. What makes it different is that it opens already knowing your plants, your frost dates and your notes — so 'what should I do this week?' has a real answer instead of a general one.

Send Rafe a photo of a plant that looks wrong, and he answers using that plant's own history — what you fed it, when it went in, what you wrote down in June. Here is what he can see, what he refuses to guess, and why he never adds a plant without asking you first.

On any plant's page there is a line that says Match the symptoms yourself. Tap it and you get a list of what people actually see on that crop — holes in the leaves, a dark patch on the fruit, wilting in the afternoon. Pick one and you get the causes, written by the people who study that crop, with their name on it and a link back.

Every screen in GardenTrack has a small pencil button. Tap it, say what is wrong, send. The app attaches which screen you were on, so you never have to describe it.

What each failure message under a message actually means, why Try again sometimes looks like it is doing nothing, and where your words are while they wait. Nothing you typed is lost when a send fails — it is on your phone, queued, and it goes on its own.

The four numbers GardenTrack keeps about how the app is used, what one of those records holds — a random number and a timestamp — and why it stops the moment you make an account.

Every crop in GardenTrack has a picture, and none of them is a photograph of your garden. Here is what they are, why they sit on a plain tile, and what to do when one looks nothing like what you are growing.

The screen you open in the morning. What lands on it, what order it comes in, and the one rule behind that order: only two things ever outrank a job you asked for yourself.

Everything the garden is asking for, under Calendar and Tasks, in a few short groups: Overdue, Today, This week, Any day, then Later. Every row still says its own when, there is no progress bar, and deciding to do none of it today is still a perfectly good answer.

A fruit tree owes you three or four jobs a year, not one a week. GardenTrack lists them with when each one falls, and it knows that a cherry must not be pruned when an apple is.

Some of the scariest things a plant does are the plant working correctly. GardenTrack names the three that get misread as a dying plant, tells you what the plant is actually doing, and says when the sign is really a deadline.

A task that says "Thin seedlings" is only half an instruction. GardenTrack now puts the measurement in the job itself — how far apart, how deep, how much water, and how to tell a thing is ready.

Come back from a week away and every garden app shows you the same undifferentiated list. GardenTrack sorts the once-a-year jobs into the ones you can still do and the ones whose window has closed until next year — and it will not accuse you of missing anything from before you had the app.

The menu button at the top left, the five buttons along the bottom, the leaf for your account, and the one line above the buttons that says what matters now.

Almost every date in GardenTrack is worked out from your last and first frost. Here is where those two dates come from, how precise they are, and what happens if you skip the step.

GardenTrack checks every perennial you add against how cold your winter gets, and tells you before you plant if it will not come through. It never stops you — it tells you what to do instead.

GardenTrack walks you through the week of moving seedlings outdoors: one step a day, a bring-in time for each one, and a record of how long they were actually out.

GardenTrack checks tonight's forecast against every plant you are growing and warns you about the ones that will not survive it. Hardy crops stay silent on purpose.

The Calendar shows every plant you're growing this year as a bar across your own frost dates, grouped by zone and bed. Grab a planned bar's handle to slide it to a new day, add a succession from a row's … menu, or tell Rafe to plant something for a day still to come.

When a run of hot days is coming, GardenTrack checks it against the plants you are growing and tells you three days ahead and again the evening before. Plants in pots get a different answer from plants in the ground.

Every 'days to maturity' number counts from sowing, and a cutting or a nursery plant was never sown here. What we can tell you, what we round toward, and the two things you can look at that beat any number.

GardenTrack projects every job your plants will need for the rest of their lives and buckets it by week, so you can see the crunch coming. Here is how to read the chart, why some dates say about, and why it will tell you when no week stands out.

The Garden Planner builds one whole plan for the rest of your growing season from your own places and frost dates — pick Most plants, Least work or A bit of both, see the jobs and hours it costs, then plant all of it in one tap.

Star a crop or a variety on its page and it lands on your Favorites list — nothing is planted, it is a list to come back to. The Garden Planner puts your favorites into a plan first.

Photographing a plant writes a journal entry. The picture is saved on your phone first so it works with no signal, then backed up. Here is what it does, and the two things it does not do yet.

Add a batch of photos at once. If you shoot a tag then its tree, we pair those two first — before we even guess from the picture — and read the tag's variety, size and grower. Tap two cards and a visible Same plant button fixes the rest. Nothing is saved until you tap a card listing every plant it will make.

Two ways to make a plant leave your garden, and they mean opposite things. Delete is for something you added by mistake and it removes every trace. Recording a death keeps the plant, the dates and the journal — because a plant that died is a real thing that happened in your garden.

The floating microphone starts listening the moment you tap it, right where you are standing. Opened on one of your plants it says which plant, and it takes a photo. Here is what it does, what it deliberately does not do, and the one thing about speaking that needs a connection.

Pick the spots you are going to look at, walk them in order, and photograph each one as you get there — two or three pictures of a bed is fine. Once you tap through the last stop we read the whole walk: every stop's pictures together, compared with the last picture of that spot, with its journal and this week's weather in front of us. The report is saved to the walk and we let you know it is ready.

Tap Harvested and the app asks how much, with the amounts you actually pick already on buttons. Answer in a second or skip it — either way the harvest is already saved.

Every plant in GardenTrack is rooted in something — a bed, a row, a pot, a windowsill. Here is where your growing spaces are listed, what a space's own page shows you, how to rename or resize one, how to make a new one before you plant anything, and what happens to one you empty out.

Everything you record is written to your phone first and copied to your account afterwards. Here is what the counter at the bottom of the screen means, and what to do when it says a change is not backed up.

Every plant keeps a dated record, and every bed shows the record of everything in it. Entries are sorted into what happened, how it went, and whether it was worth remembering.

Everything you have seen and written, photos first, folding from this week into the months before. One search finds a plant, a bed, a problem, a month or a word — and photos come back as photos. The card at the top is your own picture, chosen for you each day.