How gardens are organized

Three things make up the shape of Grow Food Together: a garden, the areas inside it, and the plants in those areas. Everything else — activities, harvests, photos, the shed — hangs off one of the three.

The short version: a garden holds areas, an area holds plants, and a plant is one thing you are growing in one place. The rest of this page is the detail, and the detail is mostly about how little of it you are forced to fill in.

#Gardens

A garden is the outer container, and the unit of sharing. It has a name, a location you choose how precisely to state, and optionally a hardiness zone. Everything inside a garden belongs to that garden: its areas, its plants, its activity log, its photos, its shed, its prices.

You can have as many gardens as you want. People commonly keep one, but a second one for an allotment or a parent’s yard is normal, and there is no charge for it.

A garden is also the thing you share. When you invite someone, you invite them into a garden — not into a plant or an area. Who can do what is on sharing, roles and public gardens.

Location is worth a word. It is shown publicly if your garden is public, so a neighbourhood or a city is the right level of detail — there is no reason to put a street address in. The hardiness zone is a shorthand for how cold your winters get, which is what tells you whether a plant will survive the year where you live. If you are in the US you can type a ZIP and Grow Food Together will fill the zone in. If you do not know it, leave it blank; nothing breaks.

#Areas

An area is anywhere you grow — a raised bed, a row of containers on a balcony, a greenhouse, a patch of open ground. Most people start with one or two.

Areas exist so the app can group things for you. Plants live in an area, so you can water or mulch a whole bed in one go instead of plant by plant, and so the garden page can show you a row per bed instead of one long list of everything you own.

There are six kinds, and the kind is only a label to help you tell them apart: raised bed, container, in ground, greenhouse, hydroponic, and other.

Two things about areas surprise people:

A plant does not need an area. You can add plants and sort them into beds later, or never. A plant with no area still shows up everywhere it should.

An area can have a history before anything is planted in it. You can log against an empty bed — a load of compost dug in, a solarizing tarp laid down — and that record stays with the bed when you plant into it.

You can drag areas into the order you want them, and drag plants into the order you want them inside an area. That order is yours; it is not alphabetical unless you make it so.

#Plants

A plant is one thing growing in one place. If you put in six lettuces, that is six plants — Grow Food Together will create them for you in one go, so you are not typing the same thing six times.

A plant can carry a spot (“row 2, left”), which is free text, because no two people describe a bed the same way.

#Planned, growing, done

A plant is in one of three stages, and you never set the stage directly — it is worked out from the dates:

• Planned — no planted date, or a planted date in the future. Something you intend to put in.
• Growing — it has a planted date and no end date. It is in the ground.
• Done — it has an end date. Pulled up, died, or finished for the year.

This is why there is no “status” dropdown to get wrong. Mark a plant planted and it starts growing; mark it done and it stops. You can reopen a plant if you marked it done by mistake.

#Species and varieties

Every plant can point at a species (“Tomato”) and, under it, a variety (“Sun Gold”). Grow Food Together ships a catalog of common species and varieties, browsable at Learn, and those carry useful defaults: days to maturity, spacing, the units the crop is usually picked in.

If what you are growing is not in the catalog, type it in anyway. Grow Food Together will create the species or variety for your garden alone. It works exactly like a catalog one, it just is not visible to anyone else. If a lot of people end up adding the same thing, we promote it into the shared catalog.

#Annuals, perennials and trees

A species is one of three habits, and it changes what Grow Food Together expects of it.

Annuals run once. Grow Food Together knows roughly how many days they take to mature, so it can tell you a bean planted in May is worth checking in July, and it can tell you when a bed will be free.

Perennials and trees do not work that way — an eight-year-old apple has no “days to maturity”. Instead they carry the months they are normally picked in, and Grow Food Together shows a season rather than a date. It will not nag you to harvest a fruit tree in one shot, and it will not mark it done when you pick from it.

#Crops

There is one word here that is not a thing you create. A crop is a label — “tomato” — that ties together everything of that kind across the app, mostly so prices can be attached to it. When you set a price for chard, you set it for the crop, and every chard plant in the garden picks it up.

You never make a crop, or manage a list of them. It is the name of the species, normalized. It is worth knowing the word only because you will see it on the prices page.

#What hangs off all this

• Activities — everything anyone does, logged against the whole garden, some plants, or an empty area. See logging activities.
• Harvests — what you picked, what it weighed, what it was worth. See recording harvests.
• Photos — attached to a garden, an area, a plant, an activity or a harvest, and pulled together into a timeline. See photos and storage.
• The shed — the seeds, feeds and supplies you keep, and what you have used them on.

None of them are compulsory either. A garden with plants and nothing else is a perfectly good garden.