These Are the Best Free Gardening Apps
While one of the benefits of gardening is enjoying the outdoors, using technology doesn’t take anything away from that. In fact, I’d say it makes being outside possible because you don’t have to be tied to documents or books—all you need is your phone or tablet. While I’ve long since started using spreadsheets to display what I’m planting in seed trays or Adobe Illustrator to map my beds, I’ve been slower to embrace gardening apps. I was somewhat naively waiting for “the one,” the app that will do everything as long as I happily pay. Instead, I use different apps in small ways for almost every aspect of gardening, depending on what I need.
The Best Free Way to Identify Plants
It never ceases to amuse me how many friends send me photos of plants and ask me to identify them because I usually have no idea what I’m looking at. In my garden, I figure out what I’m looking at using a plant identification app and benefit weekly from Plantnet . He rarely disappointed me by being able to identify plants, even from a less-than-stellar image, and immediately linking to information about the plant. You can also use it offline, so you won’t need any maintenance.
ADHD-Proof Row Planting
Post-planting (or planting crops every few weeks so that the crop is ready for harvest at different times rather than all at once) is a test of the best intentions. Keeping track of when to sow, when to harvest, and then actually following through is a challenge for anyone, but I really struggle with it and need reminders to stay on track. While Seedtime is advertised as a planting app to help you manage your entire garden, and it’s incredibly popular, I’m really just using the sequence planning aspect. While you can get about the same result using spreadsheets, Google Calendar, and your own research, Seedtime does most of the work for you, creating a customized calendar based on the crops you want to grow. There are paid tiers , but you can stay on the free plan and get many features, including one planting calendar. Paid tiers will give you more features for using Seedtime as a gardening log (which is a great idea) and the ability to save more data from your gardens, such as yields and germination rates.
Eliminate crowdscaping
Almost every gardener I know grows or buys too many plants and then overcrowds their beds. This is easy to do when the plants are so small – at this stage the beds can look sparse. Apps like Planter can help you understand how much space each plant really needs, since they all grow to different sizes, with some growing vertically and others horizontally. To truly understand what can be packed into a particular bed, I use this app to help me bring myself back down to earth and truly appreciate the distance. Like Seedtime, Planter tries to be the app that does everything for your garden, so you can also use a growing calendar, but I think Seedtime does it better and Planter is better at planning beds. Planter has plans that start at $1 per month , which are great, but you’ll get most of what you need in the free plan.
Landing a companion on the fly
Over time, you will be able to learn which crops benefit from interplanting and, more importantly, which crops should not be interplanted. Although there are excellent diagrams that explain this in detail, they are difficult to navigate when in the garden. Instead, I use the Seed to Spoon app . I can quickly, right in the garden, find a specific vegetable or flower and get data on what to replant and what to avoid, as well as a bunch of other information about growing a particular plant. There are some other features I like about this app, such as general reminders on what to plant now or what to plant soon on the home page, but I mainly use this app as a reference library for replanting. Seed to Spoon is free to use, but you can upgrade for $47 per year to gain access to additional features such as an AI-powered garden chatbot.
Take advantage of free online tools
Even though Johnny Seeds is not an app, it does have a ton of free tools that you should use. I use a seed quantity calculator to determine how many seeds or shoots of a particular plant I should get based on the space I have. There is also a seed planner that does many of the calculations for you based on frost dates. Take a moment to review our list of tools for planning, growing, and harvesting. Gardenate is a free online tool that will tell you what to grow in your zip code right now and whether you should start sowing or planting.