The garden assistant

The assistant is the part of Grow Food Together that reads your garden and answers questions about it. Not gardening in general — your beds, your plants, and what you have actually logged.

There are four pieces of it, and they behave differently enough to be worth taking separately.

#What it can see

Everything inside the garden you are asking about: the areas, the plants and their species and dates, the activity log, the harvests, and what is in the shed including what it cost.

It can also write to the garden when you ask it to — create an area, add a plant, log an activity, record a harvest, add something to the shed, or save a note to remember. It does those things because you asked, in the conversation, and they appear in the log like any other entry.

#What it can’t see

Your other gardens. Somebody else’s garden. Anything outside the garden in question.

#Chat

Ask it anything. It has the history, so “what did I spray on the roses in June” and “which bed is free next month” are answerable in a way a search engine cannot manage.

You can scope a conversation to a single plant, which is usually what you want when something is wrong with one specific thing.

It remembers things worth remembering — that you garden on clay, that the far bed floods — and you can see, pin and delete those memories from the garden’s assistant page.

#The plant doctor

Show it a photo of a sick plant and a sentence about what you are seeing, and it gives you a diagnosis: the likely cause, how confident it is, the symptom it is reading, what to do about it, and a check you can run to confirm.

Three things are worth knowing:

It states its confidence, and you should read it. Low confidence means low confidence. It also offers alternatives it considered rather than committing to one answer and hiding the doubt.

It knows what you own. Treatments are grounded in what is actually in your shed and what you have already applied, rather than recommending something you would have to go and buy.

It is a starting point, not an authority. It is reading a photograph. For anything irreversible — cutting into an established tree, treating something you are going to eat soon — treat it as one opinion and confirm before you act. The diagnosis is kept as a record, so you can look back at what it said and whether it was right.

#Harvest photo scanning

Photograph what you have just picked and Grow Food Together will estimate the quantity, the unit and the value, and fill the harvest form in for you. You can correct anything before saving, and the photo stays attached to the harvest.

It is an estimate from a picture. It is good enough for a running tally and it is not a scale.

#The garden briefing

A short written summary of where your garden is: what needs attention, what is coming ready, what has happened lately. It appears on the garden’s dashboard and regenerates when there is something new to say — a quiet garden does not produce a fresh briefing saying nothing has changed.

Every plan gets a briefing; how often it refreshes is one of the differences between them.

#What it costs

The assistant is the paid part of Grow Food Together, along with photo storage. Every account gets a one-time allowance of the AI features to try — it does not expire, so signing up in November and not opening it until March costs you nothing.

The current plans, allowances and limits are on the pricing page.

#If you would rather not use it

Nothing in Grow Food Together requires the assistant. The record, the sharing, the analytics and the photo timeline all work without ever opening it.