What Grow Food Together is (and isn't)

Grow Food Together is a record of a food garden. You write down what you planted, what you did to it, and what you picked. Everyone who works in the garden writes into the same record, and over a season it turns into something no single person was carrying in their head.

That is the whole idea. Most of what follows is detail.

#The four things it’s good at

Keeping the record. A garden, the areas inside it, the plants in those areas, and a log of everything anyone did — watering, weeding, pruning, feeding, transplanting, or just a note. Each entry can carry photos. The log is what everything else is built on.

Sharing the work. A garden can have as many people in it as you like, at four different levels of access, and it costs nothing. The person who pulls the weeds on Tuesday is not always the person who set the garden up, and both of them should be able to write it down. Someone can log work on another person’s behalf, and the entry says who did it and who typed it.

Telling you what came of it. Record a harvest and Grow Food Together keeps a running tally of what the garden produced — by weight, by count, and by what it was worth. You can set your own prices, per crop and per unit, because “a bunch of chard” is worth what it is worth where you live, not what a national average says.

Answering questions about your particular garden. The assistant can see your beds, your plants, your shed and everything you have logged, so it can answer things a search engine cannot: what is wrong with this plant, what did I spray on it in June, when should this bed be free. There is a plant doctor that reads a photo of a sick plant and gives you a diagnosis with its confidence stated plainly.

#Planning

There is no drag-and-drop bed designer, and nothing that hands you a sowing calendar for next weekend. What there is, if you are on a paid plan, is an assistant that can already see your beds, what is in them, and what you grew there before — so “what should follow the garlic, and when?” is a question you can ask and get a specific answer to, rather than a generic one.

That is a different shape from a planner, and for some people it will be a worse one. It is worth knowing which you are looking for before you decide this is the right tool.

#What it deliberately doesn’t do

It is not a plant identifier. Point it at a sick plant and it will tell you what is wrong with it. Point it at an unknown plant and it is the wrong tool.

It does not sell your data or run ads. There is no ad code in the app.

It does not hold your records hostage. Everything you write down — gardens, areas, plants, activities, harvests, however many of each — is free, on every plan, forever. There is no row limit and there never will be. The paid plan buys you more photo storage and the assistant; it does not buy you permission to keep using your own record. If you stop paying, nothing you wrote down goes away.

#What costs money

Two things cost us real money to provide, so those are the two things the paid plan covers: photo storage and AI. Everything else is database rows, and database rows are cheap.

The current plans and what each one includes are on the pricing page — that page reads the limits straight out of the code that enforces them, which is why the numbers live there and not here.

#Where to go next

If you are setting up your first garden, start with getting started. If someone invited you into theirs, read you were invited to a garden instead — your path is different and shorter.

If you want to understand the shape of the thing before you touch it, how gardens are organized is the page that explains the model.