Getting started

Setting up a garden takes a few minutes and none of it is permanent. Every step can be skipped, and everything you enter can be changed later.

Which of these is you?

• You don’t have an account yet — start below.
• Someone invited you into their garden — your path is different and much shorter. Read you were invited to a garden.
• You’ve just finished setting up — see your first week.

#Getting an account

You need an account before you can do anything. On the sign-in page you will see either Sign up or Request access, depending on whether sign-ups are open at the moment.

#The setup wizard

Once you are in, Grow Food Together walks you through four steps. There is a Skip for now button on every one of them, and it is a real button — skipping does not leave you half-configured.

#1. Where do you grow?

A name for the garden, and optionally where it is.

The name is prefilled with yours; change it to whatever you actually call the place. The location is shown publicly if your garden is public, so a neighbourhood or a city is enough — there is no reason to give a street address.

If you are in the US, type your ZIP and Grow Food Together fills in your hardiness zone, which is shorthand for how cold your winters get and therefore whether a plant will survive the year where you live. Don’t know it? Leave it. Nothing depends on it being right.

There is also a checkbox that puts your garden on Explore, where anyone can find it. It is ticked by default. A public garden shows your plants, your log and your photos to visitors — but never your costs, your shed or your assistant history. You can turn it off here or in settings at any time. Details are in sharing, roles and public gardens.

Only this step creates the garden. If you go back and forward again, you will not end up with two.

#2. Where will you plant?

Up to three areas, from one-tap presets: Raised Bed 1, Containers, Back Garden. Rename them, change their kind, or leave rows blank to skip them.

The point of this step is the idea rather than the form. An area is anywhere you grow — a raised bed, a row of containers on a balcony, a greenhouse, a patch of open ground. Areas are how the app groups things for you: plants live in an area, so you can water a whole bed in one go instead of plant by plant.

Not sure yet? Skip it. Plants do not need an area, and you can add areas whenever the garden takes shape.

#3. What are you growing?

A grid of common crops — tomato, lettuce, basil, pepper, cucumber and a dozen more. Tap everything that is in the ground or about to be, set how many of each, and choose which area they are going into.

Those tiles are a shortcut, not a limit. Anything in the catalog can be added afterwards, and anything not in the catalog can be typed in.

Set the quantity to what you actually planted: six lettuces creates six plants, so you can track them individually rather than as a lump. They are recorded as planted today, so the garden opens with things growing rather than a list of plans.

#4. Add a photo

Optional, and the shortest step. A cover photo for the garden — even a quick snap of one bed makes the place yours, and it is the first entry in your photo timeline.

#Then what?

You land on a page with four suggestions, and then on your garden.

Nothing about setup is locked in. Rename the garden, add or delete areas, drag things into a different order, change your mind about being public — all of it is in the garden’s settings, and none of it will cost you the record you have already built.

What people actually do in the days after setup is in your first week.