Spring is right around the corner, and that means it’s time to get the gears in motion for the growing season.
No matter what you hope to plant this year, a successful garden starts with proper planning.
Fortunately, this is easier than ever as there are many useful mobile apps that you can download to plot out everything about your garden – from sourcing and planting to care and harvest.
These are the 5 best gardening and plant guide apps for Android and iPhone, that you can put to use to make this the best growing season ever. Use them to keep organized throughout the year, and let us know which one turns out to be your favorite!
Smart Plant
If ever there were a super-handy, all in one app for gardeners to optimize every aspect of their garden, it’s Smart Plant.
Available for both iPhone and Android, Smart Plant allows you to identify plants based on looks and characteristics (like others in this list).
But where it really stands out from the rest is in its “Digital Care Calendar,” which gives users the ability to plan every step of their garden process from germination to plant to relocation, and to care and eventual harvest.
Smart Plant also offers a monthly subscription box that is designed to boost your self-care and mental health through plants and produce.
The box ensures a holistic collection of plants and produce each month. Whether or not you opt-in, the app itself is an incredible tool that you can use to leverage your chops this coming season.
Smart Plant is available in many languages including Spanish, English, German, and more. For help translating commongs fruits and vegetables between English and Spanish, try this helpful guide from Live Lingua.
Planting Calendars from Johnny’s Seeds
Knowing exactly when to plant your garden is tough. It depends on factors such as climate, day-to-day weather, altitude, and even smaller things like shade and sunlight on your specific property.
This is a handy site to have bookmarked on your iPhone or Android as it breaks down each of these factors as they pertain to specific seeds.
You’ll learn when to plant what, what to look out for, and even if there are one-off or annual conditions you need to keep in mind when scheduling your planting this year.
The site at large is loaded with growing tips and knowledge surrounding all facets of gardening. And, this app clearly spells out how long germination periods last and even how far in advance you should plant seeds before setting them outside.
It’s an all-in-one guide to everything plating-related, sourced from pros who have devoted their lives to best practices for home gardening.
Territorial Seeds’ Garden Journal
Gardening is more than a hobby – it’s a passion, and for many, it’s a way of life. Thing is, as you progress as a gardener and gain more experience it can be tough to remember each and every thing you’ve planted and when.
That’s where the Garden Journal comes in handy. This app allows you to track what you’ve planted, where you planted it, and make notes on how much yield you received, problems encountered, or other memorable experiences from each growing season.
The app also lets you plan for future plantings, and plan to arrange your garden in a way that allows for optimal crop rotation and locations for each seed you plant.
It offers localized pest and weather information so you know when to plant and what to look out for, and has a thorough library of content with which you can expand your knowledge around everything in your garden now, and everything you hope to grow down the line.
GrowIt!
Everything can be a social activity these days, even gardening. GrowIt! is a social app for gardeners built around crowd-sourced knowledge and problem-solving.
You can upload photos of plants in your garden and ask questions about them, with experts in the community weighing in on the right answer.
Because the community of gardeners is so expensive (literally thousands of users log on each day) you’re likely to source multiple answers to questions and be able to parse through and find commonalities between them, and then implement those practices into your garden.
The cool thing about this app is that it takes something that is largely a solo or family activity (gardening) and builds a community around it.
Many users make friends on the app, meetups and virtual hangs are not uncommon as a result, and you can be sure that each person you interact with, or simply read information from, shares the same passion for home gardening as you do.
There are no influences beyond the pale here – just a community of growers building off one another to fuel their passion.
Garden Answers
Garden Answers is the best app for both actual gardeners and curious minds who simply want to know what it is they’re looking at.
This app, available for both iPhone and Android, allows you to identify everything from flowers to edibles to trees, simply by taking a photo of it.
Garden Answers has a database of more than 3 million plant species, and it automatically categorizes your submissions and returns results in an instant.
Beyond simply identifying the plant, this app also notes common pests and diseases, provides basic info on the plant like where it grows and when, and allows users to ask questions and source answers.
So the next time you’re wandering around your backyard and find something unusual sprouting from the ground, you can not only identify what it is but why on earth it’s growing in your yard in the first place.
