Your first week

Setup gives you a garden with plants in it. That is a list. What turns it into a record is a handful of small habits, and they take about a minute each.

None of this is required, and nothing expires. Do them in any order, or not at all.

#Log something you did

This is the one that matters. Watered the beds, pulled some weeds, moved a seedling, noticed the squash looking unhappy — write it down.

An entry takes a few taps: what you did, and what it applies to. You can log against the whole garden (“watered everything”), against particular plants, or against an empty bed you have only just dug compost into. Add a photo if there is one worth keeping.

Everything else in Grow Food Together is built on this log. The analytics count it, the weekly digest summarizes it, and the assistant reads it when you ask what happened to a plant. A garden with no log is a garden Grow Food Together cannot tell you anything about.

More on what you can record: logging activities.

#Record the first thing you pick

Even if it is three radishes. Weigh them or don’t — you can record a count, a weight, or a bunch, whichever matches how you actually think about the crop.

Harvests are what give you the other half of the picture: what the garden produced, and what it was worth against what it cost. If you set your own prices, that figure means something local rather than something averaged.

If you are harvesting from several plants at once, do them together — Grow Food Together will split the total across them sensibly rather than making you do arithmetic.

More: recording harvests.

#Take a photo of a bed

Photos are the thing people are most glad of later. A bed in April and the same bed in July is a more honest record of a season than any number.

Every photo goes onto a timeline — the garden’s, and the plant’s if you attached it to one. You can pin one as the cover.

More: photos and storage.

#Bring someone in

If anyone else works in this garden — a partner, a housemate, a neighbour, the person whose allotment it half is — invite them. Sharing is free, however many people you add, and there is no limit on it.

It is worth doing early rather than late, because the value is in both of you writing into the same record. Give them manager if you want them logging work; viewer if you just want them to be able to look.

More: sharing, roles and public gardens.

#After that

Once there is a week or two of log in there, the parts of the app that need history start earning their keep: the dashboard tells you what needs attention, the analytics have something to add up, and the assistant can answer questions about your particular garden rather than gardening in general.

Nothing needs to be done every day. A record with gaps in it is still a record.