Sharing, roles and public gardens

Share a garden so someone can learn from your growing or help tend it. You can invite people into a private garden, or make your garden public for others to explore and follow.

Invited people join for free. The owner pays for the garden, including its shared assistant allowance. Photos added to the garden count against the owner’s storage. See pricing for current terms and allowances.

There are two ways to share access:

• Membership gives someone access by invitation. Their role determines whether they can read and comment or also edit garden records.
• Public visibility lets anyone view the garden’s public record. Signed-in visitors can follow it and comment, but cannot edit it.

#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
Comment on activities and harvests, and reply to comments	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
Remove someone else’s comment	no	yes	yes
Delete the garden	no	no	yes
Subscribe the garden, or cancel it	no	no	yes

Every “yes” in the writing rows assumes the garden is being paid for. A garden whose subscription has lapsed is read-only for everybody in it, owner included — see your account and your garden for exactly what a frozen garden still allows. Reading, sharing, moderating and exporting are not affected.

Billing is the owner’s alone. A manager can change nearly everything about a garden, but not what it costs: starting a subscription puts a charge on the owner’s card, and cancelling one would take the garden read-only for everybody in it. Managers reach the settings page where that lives and see where the garden stands; the buttons are the owner’s.

All garden members can see recorded costs and estimated harvest values, as well as assistant conversations. Choose whom you invite with that access in mind.

#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 access to manage records and sharing, but not billing or deletion.

#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. You can still enter an email address to send an invitation.

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. The “logged by” note identifies who entered the record.

#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.

Costs are public too. Visitors can see what plants cost, the shed and its value, recorded spending, estimated harvest value, and return on those costs.

If you would rather not publish that, the setting to change is whether the garden is public at all. There is no separate setting to hide costs on a public garden.

#What a visitor never sees

Your conversations with the assistant. These are visible to garden members, including viewers, but not to public visitors.

They also never see the watering setup or the print tools, and nothing that would let them change anything .

The location you gave the garden is shown, which is why the setup step suggests a neighborhood 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.

#Sending someone a link

Paste a link into Slack, Messages or anywhere else that expands links and it arrives as a card rather than a bare URL: a harvest shows who picked what, your notes if you wrote any, and the photo. The garden, a bed, a single plant, an activity, an approved technique and a blog post all preview the same way, each with its own cover photo — a technique’s is the picture on its first illustrated step.

A page with no photo still previews — it just shows the app mark instead of a picture, when there is no cover photo.

That preview is built from the public page, so it follows the same rule as everything else here. A harvest in a private garden does not preview at all — not for a stranger, and not for you either: the preview is fetched by the chat app rather than by the person you sent it to, and it arrives with no way to prove who it is.

A photo taken down by moderation stops appearing in previews too, including in links that were already sent.

#Subscribing to a garden

A public garden’s activity is also available as a feed, if you would rather read it in a feed reader than visit the page. Add the garden’s activity page to your reader and it will find the feed on its own.

The filters travel with it: narrow the page to harvests, or to harvests with photos, and subscribe to that — the reader then shows only what you filtered to. Private gardens have no feed, for the same reason they have no previews.

#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. Viewers do not receive that notification.

#Comments, and taking one down

Comments are a place to ask about a method, discuss a harvest, or share what you noticed. Anyone signed in can comment on activities and harvests in a public garden. Comments in a private garden are visible to its members and site administrators. Garden viewers can comment even though they cannot edit records.

You can reply to a comment. The author of the activity or harvest and the person you reply to can receive a notification. Published techniques also have comments for questions and experiences; they do not have a separate ratings system.

Whoever wrote a comment can remove it, and so can the garden’s managers and owners — see the table above — and so can we. Delete is on the comment itself.

Any comment can also be reported. Report sits next to it and puts the comment in front of the team for review. Reporting does not remove it.