Sharing, roles and public gardens

Grow Food Together is built around more than one person keeping the same record. Sharing a garden is free, there is no limit on how many people you add, and it is not part of any paid plan — it is the point of the app, so it is not something we would charge for.

There are two different things that get called “sharing”, and they are worth keeping apart:

• Membership — you invite someone into a garden. They can see the private parts, and depending on their role, change things.
• Public visibility — anyone on the internet can look at the garden. They cannot change anything, and they cannot see the private parts.

#Roles

Everyone in a garden is a member of it. The role says what they can do, and there are three.

	viewer	manager	owner
See the dashboard, plants, log, photos, areas	yes	yes	yes
See the shed and what it cost, spend and ROI, watering, assistant history	yes	yes	yes
Add or edit plants, areas, activities, harvests, photos, shed items	no	yes	yes
Set crop prices	no	yes	yes
Change settings, invite people, change roles, make the garden public	no	yes	yes
Delete the garden	no	no	yes

Reading is generous; writing is not. Anyone in the garden, at any role, sees the financial side — what the shed cost, what has been spent, what the harvest was worth. That is deliberate: if you trusted someone enough to let them into the garden, hiding the compost receipt from them is theatre.

#Ownership can’t be transferred

There is no way to hand a garden to someone else. The person who created it is the owner, permanently, and only they can delete it. If a garden needs to change hands, the practical answer today is to make the other person a manager — that is everything except deletion.

We would rather write that down than have you look for the button.

#Inviting someone

From the garden’s settings, either search for someone who already has an account or type an email address. They get a link, and it expires after seven days.

Searching only matches usernames and display names, never email addresses. That is on purpose — an email search would let anyone confirm whether a given address has an account here.

The invite is for the person it was sent to. Someone else forwarding the link cannot use it.

Whoever accepts joins at the role you picked. You can change it afterwards, or remove them, from the same members list.

#Logging on someone else’s behalf

Often the person who did the work is not the person at the keyboard. When you log an activity or a harvest you can attribute it to another member, and the entry records both — who did it, and who wrote it down. It shows as “logged by” so the history stays honest rather than quietly crediting whoever typed fastest.

#Public gardens

A garden can be public, which puts it on Explore for anyone to find. It is a checkbox in settings, and it is reversible at any time.

#What a visitor sees

Plants, grouped by bed. The activity log. Harvests. The photo timeline. Your display name.

And the money. A public garden publishes its whole record: what the plants cost, what the shed holds and what it is worth, what has been spent, what the harvest came to, and the return on it. This is on purpose — a garden that shared everything except what it cost was hiding the part that makes the record useful to somebody deciding whether to grow the same thing.

If you would rather not publish that, the setting to change is whether the garden is public at all. There is no half-public garden.

#What a visitor never sees

Your conversations with the assistant. Asking about a sick plant is correspondence, not part of what a garden publishes, and it stays between you and the people in the garden.

They also never see the watering setup or the print tools, and nothing that would let them change anything — every form is gone, not merely disabled.

The location you gave the garden is shown, which is why the setup step suggests a neighbourhood or a city rather than a street address.

Your account carries a separate display name for exactly this reason: the name on your billing is not the name shown on a public garden.

#Following is not joining

Anyone signed in can follow a public garden. Following puts its activity in their feed. It does not make them a member, and it does not show them anything the public page does not already show.

If someone follows your garden, you are notified — owners and managers are, at least. Members and viewers are not, on the grounds that it is not their garden to be told about.