If you’re like us, you need a little help when it comes to gardening. Even the greenest thumb needs to hit the books every now and again when flowers and plants start to fail and when fruits and veggies stall. Thankfully, a multitude of gardening apps can help you make the most of your garden, whether you’re growing tomatoes, flowers, or nutritious vegetables. From apps that help you catalog your garden to helpful guides on how to make the most of your harvest, we’ve curated the best gardening apps available today.
From Seed to Spoon
With Seed to Spoon, you get a complete growing guide and personalized planting dates for more than 100 vegetables, herbs, and fruits. Your guides are based on your GPS location, so there are no differences in your location’s climate. The app facilitates logging all plants, events, notes, and photos from your garden and lists them in order of the health benefits for each. It offers extensive information on plant varieties, natural control of pests and diseases, bugs that assist your garden, and a way to build out your garden space to feed your family.
LeafSnap
With LeafSnap, just snap a photo of the wildflower or shrub you have questions about, and submit it to this knowledgeable app. LeafSnap recognizes 90% of all known species of plants and trees, covering almost everything you will encounter worldwide. It features free and unlimited snaps, instant ID of plants, flowers, fruits, and trees, access to a huge database that learns and adds information on new plant species, tracking of all the plants in your collection, reminders for plant care, a plant diary with photos, and more. Use LeafSnap to track upcoming tasks on a daily basis and stay on top of all your garden needs.
What’s That Flower?
Find out the name of any flower you see in your neighborhood or a walk through the park with What’s That Flower? Choose a flower’s color, habitat, and number of petals, and your options narrow from more than 1,000 items, after which you can browse the list to identify the flower you see. You can also use the app to help you pick which flowers you want to plant in your own garden. You need an internet connection to run this app, and removing ads costs $1. Searching by photo costs $3, though — or just use the app’s basic features free of charge.
Garden Tags
This popular gardening app — great for design inspiration — is home to a large community of friendly gardeners who are quick to offer care advice, identification help, and handy tips. You can keep a photographic journal of your garden and get reminders about pruning, or advice on the best spots for growth. You can also search the encyclopedia, see what’s popular, and follow other gardeners when you find plants and gardens that you like. Recent versions add plant recognition features to help you quickly identify plants. The app also updated how to manage privacy and communication settings and lets you set up your gardening task schedule according to your climate. Premium users on monthly, annual, or six-month plans can now change the season or frequency of various plant care tasks. The app now offers pinch and zoom gestures for plant and garden photos, the ability to date stamp your photos, and badges added to your profile.
Moon & Garden
Moon & Garden takes a unique lunar approach to planting and harvesting fruits, vegetables, and herbs in your organic garden. Using a biodynamic method, the app relies on the phases of the moon to advise you of actions you can take in caring for your garden for the following day. The app approaches gardening from a position that plants depend on lunar phases like full moon or new moon for successful sowing, repotting, transplanting, and harvesting, depending on the type of fruit, flower, or leaf you have. The app reveals not only the current phase of the moon and the zodiac sign, but also the weather forecast for determining optimal gardening conditions. The app lets you schedule your gardening tasks with its reminder feature and share your pictures with other Moon & Garden users via the Community feature. The app is free, but for $1 you can remove ads. The newest version lets you sign in via Google or Facebook.
Garden Answers Plant Identifier
With Garden Answers Plant Identifier, you can snap a photo of a plant you want to identify and submit it to the app’s experts to find out what it is. It can automatically recognize more than 20,000 plants and if it can’t identify the plant in question, you can pay $2 to get an expert identification from a botanist with additional information and advice on its care. This app also identifies pests and has a robust Q&A section that covers more than 200,000 of the most common gardening queries. The app lets you share your questions with the Garden Answers community, in addition to accessing streamlined plant ID and onboarding features, ad-free service, the ability to access all your questions and answers within the app, and enhanced answers to questions.
Gardenize
Gardenize helps you keep track of all the plants in your garden and offers information on how to care for them, including location, crop rotation, and yearly tracking of plants and crops. You can keep notes and photos of your plants in a single place. A dynamic news feed gives you perspective on how to keep your garden beautiful and healthy. Different sections of the app specialize in plants, types of flower beds or raised beds, and tasks such as watering, fertilizing, or harvesting. Document your plant development from seed to full-grown plant, track the condition of the soil and duration of sunlight, and keep a running narrative of your garden with up-to-date photos. You can create a public or private account so friends can follow you and you can track gardens worldwide. The app is free; however, if you want to export or download your information, you can choose to pay for up to 30 exports as PDFs, spreadsheets, or photo galleries. New versions get a design update and improved interface, quick access to add photos of plants, areas, and events, new photo details, and tabs for adding and editing plants.
Gardenate
Gardenate is the ideal solution if you’re looking for a simple calendar for planting garden vegetables. With this app, you can locate detailed information on various vegetables, set a schedule, and plan your garden. The app offers details for growing nearly 100 popular garden vegetables, with specific planting information for the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. This app stands out from the crowd with a simple, user-friendly interface and can operate offline. Gardenate pre-selects your last saved garden bed automatically once you start planting or adding items to your wish list. Gardeners everywhere will appreciate the visibility for sowing, seed trays, and growing once you start adding your favorite plants. The iOS version costs $2 while the Android version costs $1.
