Recording harvests

A harvest records what you picked, from which plant, when, and how much. From that Grow Food Together works out weight and value, and pairs them against what the garden cost to run.

You can record a harvest in whatever unit you actually think in. There is no requirement to weigh anything.

#Units

Pick from: leaves, bunches, pieces, grams, oz, lbs, kg, pints, quarts and cups.

Grow Food Together narrows the list to what suits the crop — a lettuce offers leaves, a tomato offers pieces and weights — but you are never locked into the suggestion.

“Pieces” displays as the crop’s own name where Grow Food Together knows it, so three apples read as 3 apples rather than 3 pieces.

#Harvesting from several plants at once

This is the normal case and it has its own screen. Pick the crop, and Grow Food Together lists the plants of that crop that are currently growing. Enter a total and it splits it across them; enter figures per plant where you know them and it fills in the rest.

Countable units are split as whole numbers — you cannot pick 2.5 radishes — and the remainder is rotated rather than always landing on the same plant. Weights and volumes split fractionally.

The result is one harvest per plant, grouped together, so each plant’s own history is right while the batch still reads as a single picking.

#Weight

Every harvest is stored with a weight in pounds as well as the unit you typed, which is what lets Grow Food Together total a season that was recorded in bunches, cups and grams.

Where a unit is not already a weight, it needs to know what one of them weighs. There are sensible defaults per crop, and you can override them for your garden — if your chard bunches are bigger than average, say so once and every chard harvest is right.

#Value

Value comes from a price for the crop, and Grow Food Together looks in this order:

1. A price you set for this variety.
2. A price you set for this crop.
3. A general market price, where one is known.
4. Nothing — the harvest is still recorded, just without a value.

#Setting your own prices

The garden’s crop prices page is where this lives. Prices carry a unit, so you can say chard is $2.00 a bunch rather than translating into dollars per pound and hoping.

That matters more than it sounds. If you price something per bunch and harvest it in bunches, the exact price is used as-is — no conversion, no rounding drift. It is only when the units differ that Grow Food Together converts, through pounds.

Your prices are kept per garden, with a history, so you can see what you were valuing a crop at last summer.

#What it’s set against

The garden’s analytics pair harvest value against what has been spent: water, fertilizer, pesticide, supplies, seeds, tools, and what you paid for the plants themselves. Any row there opens the records behind it, so a number you do not believe can be traced to the entries that produced it.

One deliberate gap: water costs nothing before 13 August 2026, because the app did not record watering runs until then. It is not a bug and it should not be “fixed” — the old behaviour billed for water nobody had used. It closes on its own as runs accumulate.

#Photos

A harvest can carry photos, and it appears in the plant’s timeline on the day it was picked, interleaved with everything else that happened to that plant.

If you would rather not type numbers at all, you can photograph the picking and have Grow Food Together estimate the quantity for you — that is part of the assistant, and it is covered in the garden assistant.