You were invited to a garden

Someone sent you a link to a garden they keep. Accepting it puts you inside their garden — you do not set anything up, and you do not get walked through a wizard, because there is nothing for you to build.

This page is the orientation the setup wizard would have given you.

#What just happened

You are now a member of one garden. It appears under Gardens, alongside any you make yourself, and it is the same garden the owner sees — not a copy. What you write in it, everyone in it sees.

Your invitation came with a role, chosen by whoever invited you. It decides what you can change. There are three, and they stack:

• viewer — read everything, change nothing.
• manager — add and edit plants, areas, activities, harvests, photos and shed items; change settings; invite other people.
• owner — everything a manager can do, plus delete the garden.

Everyone with a role is a member of the garden — “member” is not a separate level, it is what all three of you are.

If you are not sure which one you have, the members list in the garden’s settings says so. The full breakdown is in sharing, roles and public gardens.

#If you’re a viewer

You cannot break anything. The buttons that would change the garden are not there for you, so there is no way to delete somebody’s tomato by mis-clicking. Read freely.

You see everything the garden holds: the plants, the log, the photos, the shed and what it cost, the spend and ROI figures, the watering setup, and the garden’s conversations with the assistant.

If the garden is public, most of that is public too — the exceptions are the watering setup and the assistant’s history, which stay with the people in the garden. See sharing, roles and public gardens.

If you want to start logging work, ask whoever invited you to make you a manager. It is one dropdown in the members list.

#If you’re a manager

You can do essentially everything the owner can, apart from deleting the garden. Worth knowing before you start:

You can log work on someone else’s behalf. If the person who actually watered is not the person at the keyboard, say so — the entry records both, and reads “logged by you” so the history stays honest.

Costs are shared. Anything you enter about what things cost feeds the same spend and ROI figures the owner sees.

#Where things are

• The garden’s dashboard — what needs attention, a row per bed, and the latest activity.
• Plants — everything growing, grouped by bed or by type, however you prefer to sort it.
• Activity — the log. This is the heart of it; see logging activities.
• Photos — the garden’s timeline.

If the garden is new and empty, that is normal — it fills up as people log things.

#Starting your own

Joining someone’s garden does not use anything up. You can create your own at any time, from Gardens → Create a garden, and it does not affect your membership here. Extra gardens are free, and so is inviting people into them.

If you would rather start there, read getting started — that is the path for setting one up from scratch.

#Leaving

You can leave a garden from its members list. One thing to know: if it is the only garden you belong to and you leave it, Grow Food Together will offer you the setup wizard next time you sign in, because from its point of view you now have no garden at all. Nothing is lost — the garden you left carries on without you.