Built by someone who is still learning to grow food.

I am not an expert, and that is rather the point

Most gardening sites are fronted by someone with forty years of perfect beds behind them. This one is not. I have been growing food on and off for six or seven years, and “on and off” is the honest part. There have been seasons where the beds were immaculate and seasons where life and health got in the way and the whole lot went to seed while I looked at it through the window.

That is the normal experience of home growing, and almost nobody writes for it. If you have ever come back to a bed after three months away and felt like you had failed, you are in the right place. You have not failed. You have a garden and a life, and they compete.

What I do have is stubbornness and a decent grasp of data. So instead of pretending to be a great gardener, I built the thing that makes an ordinary gardener better: real Australian planting windows, real supermarket prices, real pest pressure for your postcode, and a nudge when something needs doing.

Why it exists

If you have ever planted lettuce in a Brisbane October because the seed packet said “spring”, you know what is wrong with most gardening advice. The packets are written for the UK. The apps are built for the US. The YouTube tutorials assume frost dates that do not apply to Sydney, let alone Townsville. Follow them and you will do everything right and still lose the crop.

The other half of it is self sufficiency. I want to grow as much of what we eat as I reasonably can, and I want to know whether it is actually worth it. That is a question with a number attached, so I started tracking supermarket vegetable prices for my own household. Then it became obvious that nobody had put live shop prices next to proper Australian climate zone planting guides. So I built that.

Along the way I have talked a fair few people into starting a garden of their own. That turns out to be the part I enjoy most, and it is the reason this site exists as a public thing rather than a spreadsheet on my own machine.

It comes off a real block of land

This is run from a hobby farm at Dayboro, north west of Brisbane. Not a showpiece. A working few acres with paddocks that need slashing, soil that needs lime more often than I would like, and beds that are sometimes ahead of me and sometimes well behind.

There is a weather station on the property that has been logging here since 2004. It records air temperature, rainfall, soil moisture and soil temperature, and those readings feed the subtropical zone pages on this site directly. The same station feeds Dayboro.au, the local weather and community site I also run.

Farming the land is not a marketing line here. It is why the advice on this site is cautious about things like planting into cold wet soil, and why watering guidance is tied to what the ground is actually doing rather than a calendar.

It started as tradeshack.au in 2020

This is not a site that opened last season. It was established in 2020 as tradeshack.au, and over those years it carried a great deal of writing about microfarming: growing seriously on a small block, getting real yield out of limited space, and treating a suburban backyard as a productive piece of land rather than decoration.

Tradeshack grew two very different audiences, though. Some people came for the growing. Others came for the community side, the swapping, the local trading, the neighbourhood organising. Trying to serve both from one site served neither well, so in April 2026 it was split in two.

• gardenbuddy.au took the growing. Everything on this site is about getting food out of the ground, and nothing else.
• localbuddy.au took the community side, for neighbourhoods and local groups.

The plant data, the climate zone work and the price collection all carried across. Only the name and the focus changed.

Fully Australian, and it stays that way

This matters enough to say plainly rather than bury in a privacy policy.

• Everything is hosted in Brisbane. The website, the databases, the price history, your garden records, the photos you upload. All of it sits on servers here in Queensland.
• Nothing is hosted overseas. No part of this site runs from an American or European data centre.
• No cloud providers. This does not run on Amazon, Google or Microsoft infrastructure. It runs on hardware that is paid for, racked and managed here.
• Your data is not shared, sold or brokered. Not to advertisers, not to seed companies, not to anyone. There is no data business hiding behind the gardening business.
• The AI runs here too. When you photograph a sick plant for GardenBuddy Check, that image is processed on hardware I own in Australia. It is not sent to OpenAI or any other overseas service.

The plain reason: I did not want to build a gardening site that quietly turned its members into a product. If you would like the formal version, it is in the privacy policy, and it says the same thing in longer words.

How it is built

The prices you see are not guesses. Every night an automated price collector reads what Woolworths, Coles, Aldi and IGA have published on their own websites, pulls the vegetable lines, and works out a per kilogram figure for each one. A 100 g basil pack and a 1 kg bag of carrots get put on the same footing, so the comparison is honest.

I run a daily average with the worst outliers stripped out, because supermarket sites mis-tag products more often than you would think, and a herb pack listed by the gram throws a per kilo number that looks mad. Right now that gives 79 vegetables across the four retailers, priced in plain Australian dollars per kilo. The planting side covers 101 crops across the seven Australian climate zones, with month by month windows that match where you actually live, not Devon or Ohio.

The weather side runs off my own gear for the subtropical zone, as above. The other six zones have no station of mine sitting in them, so those numbers are modelled from Open-Meteo forecast data, and the pages say so rather than pretending otherwise.

It is one person, one set of servers in Australia, and a lot of evenings. No venture money, no growth targets, no investors to keep happy. If a price looks wrong, email me and I will check the mapping the same day.

Where it is up to

The site is built in the open and something new usually lands each week. What is working today:

• Prices. Daily collection across the four retailers, with a rolling 12 month history behind it.
• Guides. Climate zone planting guides for 101 crops across seven zones, plus the Plant Now tool that answers the “what goes in this month” question in one click.
• Member tools. The My Garden journal, the bed planner, harvest and ROI reporting, the care log and the Gardener Weekly Digest. This is where most of the work goes now.
• GardenBuddy Check. Photo pest and disease identification against an Australian pest database, on the Pro plan, processed on hardware here.
• Grow Together. Neighbourhood grow groups, for sharing surplus with the people near you.

Nothing on that list is a promise about the future. It is what runs today.

Pricing

Garden Buddy AU has three tiers:

• Free, today’s prices, the guides, the Plant Now tool, the 3-month price trend chart, the Gardener Weekly Digest and Weekly Price Alert emails, and a small journal (1 bed, 10 plants) with one saved bed planner plan.
• Starter ($3.99 a month or $29 a year), the full 12-month price history, price-drop alerts for the crops you grow, a pick-your-crops watchlist, an unlimited journal with care and harvest logs, and CSV export.
• Pro ($7.99 a month or $59 a year), everything in Starter, plus GardenBuddy Check photo pest ID, live pest pressure for your postcode including QLD fruit fly, weather-triggered pest alerts, sow-again suggestions worked out from your harvest log, and the Monthly Vegetable Price Report email.

Paid plans are charged when you sign up. Cancel anytime in one click and your access runs to the end of the period you paid for. We do not refund unused time, so if you are not sure, take a month rather than a year and walk away at the end of it if it is not for you.

Legal

Garden Buddy AU is operated by HELP4BIS (ABN 86 081 237 087), a small Australian software company based in Dayboro, Queensland. GST registered, fully Australian owned. All infrastructure, plant data, price monitoring and AI models run on hardware located in Brisbane, Australia.