You were invited to a garden

An invitation lets you learn from someone’s garden or help tend it. Accept the link to join their existing garden; you do not need to set up one of your own.

#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.

This costs you nothing. Your account is free, and being in somebody else’s garden is free at any role, including manager. The owner pays for the garden; nobody pays per person, and there is nothing for you to subscribe to in order to work here. That includes the assistant, whose allowance belongs to the garden and is shared by everyone in it — with one exception while a garden is still in its free first month, which the garden assistant explains.

Only the garden’s owner can start or cancel its subscription.

Your invitation came with a role, chosen by whoever invited you. It decides what you can change. The roles are:

• viewer — read the garden and participate in comments; no editing of garden records.
• manager — add and edit plants, areas, activities, harvests, photos and shed items; change settings; invite other people.
• owner — everything a manager can do, plus manage billing and 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

Look through the plants, activities, and harvests to see what the gardeners are trying. Ask questions or share observations in the comments.

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 add and edit garden records, invite people, and manage sharing. Billing and garden deletion are reserved for the owner.

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” to distinguish the work from the data entry.

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

#If the garden goes read-only

A garden whose subscription has lapsed stops accepting new entries — for everyone in it, not just its owner. You will see a notice at the top of every page of that garden saying so.

Existing records stay readable and shared with you. Owners and managers can still export them. What stops is adding and editing: no new harvests, activities, plants or photos until the owner subscribes again, at which point it carries on exactly where it left off.

If you are a manager, this is the one thing you cannot fix yourself. Only the owner can subscribe a garden.

#Where things are

• 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. 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.

A garden of your own is the paid part — that is the one thing this account does not already include. A new one’s first month is free, with no card asked for, and inviting people into it is free however many of them there are. The pricing page has the figure.

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.