This Is the Only Gardening App I Need
While gardening is a great way to unplug from all your devices and reconnect with the natural world, ironically there are a number of tech tools that can make you more successful at it, from calendars and spreadsheets to countless apps. But one of the latest, Seedtime , has become the only gardening app I use, replacing all my other digital calendars, spreadsheets, and layout tools — and even some of my non-tech tools, like notebooks and journals.
Seedtime used to be just one of many gardening apps I used to manage my outdoor work, but over the years it has gained so many features (for example, this week it added a new feature for managing my stock of seeds and other gardening supplies like fertilizer) that it has become an indispensable tool for planning and managing my garden.
Project Management for My Garden
Even though I plant roughly the same things at roughly the same time each year, getting it all into the calendar has never been an easy task. For example, if I enter my entire planting schedule into Google Calendar, but later discover that I need to push it back a week because of the weather, there’s no easy way to do it.
Seedtime’s calendar solves this problem. It’s focused on what you want to grow: You enter all the crops you want to grow, detailing whether you’ll be starting seeds indoors or outdoors, or starting seeds from scratch, and whether it’s a one-time planting like tomatoes or a routine planting like radishes. Seedtime takes all that data and turns it into a calendar that tells you when to start your seeds, when to transplant them outdoors, and when to harvest. The app will suggest when to start based on the last frost date in your zip code, or you can choose a start date manually.
If you need to push back all or part of your planting, it’s easy to do by clicking on a specific crop and changing the start date; Seedtime will take care of the rest. The calendar can be reused year after year, so you don’t have to redo your work every year. The Seedtime tool also makes it easy to track the yield of any given crop – say, radishes – so you can track which varieties are doing better than others from year to year (something I never thought about in previous years, so I just planted the same varieties over and over, year after year).
I’m a sucker for planting seeds in the summer, even though I know I need to be on top of things. Seedtime takes all the manual planning out of the equation, so I just have to follow the calendar it provides.
Automatically generated task lists
When you enter your harvest into the calendar, Seedtime turns each step of the process into a task and places it in a simple to-do list, organized by date. While the calendar gives you an overview, the to-do list offers an easy way to see what you need to do today and tomorrow, keeping you focused.
Of course, setting up these tasks can be done manually, but having the app do it for me is a real time saver, if only because of the flexibility it gives me: if it’s raining or too hot to plant, tasks can be easily postponed in the app, and those changes sync with the calendar.
You can add as many additional tasks as you need, either for your entire garden or for a single crop. There’s a robust filtering tool, so you can choose to view just seeding or planting tasks, for example. If you’ve used common project management tools like Asana or Monday, Seedtime’s tasks will feel familiar.
The app makes journaling easier
I’m a big proponent of keeping a journal for your garden. I’ve talked about keeping a visual photo journal , as well as a place to keep notes throughout the year. Notes allow you to remember little things you notice in your garden at the moment, but that you’ll likely forget by winter when you start planning next year’s garden. For example, my notes often remind me which trellis needs work, or not to plant eggplants in a certain spot next year, or that I need more flower bulbs to fill a hole in the garden.
But journaling is only useful if you remember to do it. Seedtime has a simple journaling feature that allows you to quickly enter notes and/or photos, which makes it go much more smoothly. Photos are incredibly useful for being able to see when certain crops appeared last year, so you can see if you’re on track this growing season. They can also show you how the garden is changing over time. Having an app at my disposal gives me a great way to organize my thoughts and keep them all safe and in one place – I lost my gardening journal for a month last year and it left me paralyzed. Having all that data stored in the cloud means that won’t happen again.
Track your inventory
As you garden, you’ll acquire a collection of seeds, fertilizer, and other gardening essentials. Organizing these resources is an ongoing process, and I thought I had developed a pretty good system. Once a year, I’d check my seeds, which allowed me to make sure they were still good (each type of seed has its own expiration date ), and tally up what I had before ordering more. But while this worked, I had to start from scratch every year, as planting depleted my stock.
Seedtime understands this, which is why its inventory system lets you enter all of your seeds, as well as note when they expire, how many you have, and where they came from. Seedtime ties this information to your harvest elsewhere in the app, so when you note that you planted radishes, it depletes your supply of radish seeds. You can also tie an inventory item to tasks or a specific garden. It’s not just seeds: Seedtime lets you store information about any garden input, from fertilizer to pest control, seeding, or potting mix. I was glad when Seedtime reminded me to order more plant tags this year, because it was able to tell that I was out of seeds long before I would have realized it.
The best garden layout planner
The Garden Planner is the feature that will really win you over on Seedtime. If you’re having trouble planning your garden beds, this app has you covered. You start with a blank garden plan and tell Seedtime the dimensions of your garden, and then the dimensions of each bed in your garden.
You then take the crops from the list you set up in the calendar and drag them onto the garden layout. Each crop has an assigned size requirement that you set up in the crop section, but you can change it in the layout panel; Seedtime syncs the data across both panels.
You can quickly move things around and see exactly how much space you have for additional crops, see which crops you still need to find room for, or quickly check your progress as you plant. The layers tool helps you plan for successive crops and seasonal planting—you can see where you’ll replace crops and map out when you’ll replace them and with what.
Plan your garden on your computer or mobile device
One of the best things about Seedtime is that I can access it from my mobile device and my desktop. For repetitive tasks like entering inventory or tasks where a mouse is useful like creating a garden plan, the desktop app is invaluable. But the notifications and convenience of having everything on your phone while gardening are essential. Not many apps offer both.
The app is free, but you can pay for additional features if you want them.
Seedtime has several pricing tiers, including one that is completely free. Even on the free plan, you have access to a calendar, tasks, and logs with limited data attached to each item. For $7 a month, you can store additional data, so you can add crop categories, custom tasks, and perennial crops. At this level, you get access to a layout tool and a log. For $9 a month, you get access to an inventory tool.
The app recently added AI features that will suggest crops that will grow well in your growing zone, suggest companion plants for those you already have in your garden, or suggest planting dates for successive plants. Access to the AI tools is credit-based, so free accounts get 10 credits, the $7 tier gets 100, and the $9 tier gets unlimited credits per month.