Built by a team that is still learning to grow food.

We are not experts, 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. We 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 we 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 we do have is stubbornness and a decent grasp of data. So instead of pretending to be great gardeners, we 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. We want to grow as much of what we eat as we reasonably can, and we want to know whether it is actually worth it. That is a question with a number attached, so we started tracking supermarket vegetable prices for our own households. Then it became obvious that nobody had put live shop prices next to proper Australian climate zone planting guides. So we built that.

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

It comes off a real block of land

The advice is tested on a hobby farm in south east Queensland. Not a showpiece. A working few acres with paddocks that need slashing, soil that needs lime more often than we would like, and beds that are sometimes ahead of us and sometimes well behind.

Our own weather station has been logging there since 2004. It records air temperature, rainfall, soil moisture and soil temperature, and those readings feed the subtropical zone pages on this site directly.

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.

Your data stays yours

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

• Australian owned and run. GardenBuddy.au is built and run by a small Australian team, for Australian gardens.
• Your data is not sold or brokered. Not to advertisers, not to seed companies, not to anyone. The only outside services that see any of it are the ones doing a job you asked for: Stripe when you pay, and our AI provider when you use an AI feature. There is no data business hiding behind the gardening business.
• Your photos answer your question, nothing else. A photo you send to GardenBuddy.au Check goes to our AI provider to identify the problem and give you an answer. It is not used for advertising and it is not sold.

The plain reason: we 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 the terms, and they say the same thing in longer words.

How it is built

The prices you see are not guesses. Every morning 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.

We 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 93 vegetables across the four retailers, priced in plain Australian dollars per kilo. The planting side covers 1,918 crop guides 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 our own gear for the subtropical zone, as above. The other six zones have no station of ours sitting in them, so those numbers are modelled from Open-Meteo forecast data, and the pages say so rather than pretending otherwise.

It is a small team and a lot of evenings. No venture money, no growth targets, no investors to keep happy. If a price looks wrong, email us and we 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. 1,918 climate zone planting guides 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.au Check. Photo pest and disease identification against an Australian pest database, on every plan (Pro gets the most checks).
• 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

GardenBuddy.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, a small journal (1 bed, 10 plants) with 1 saved plan in the bed planner, and GardenBuddy.au Check photo pest ID (1 photo check to try, once). Join free.
• 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, a journal with unlimited beds and unlimited plants plus care and harvest logs, and GardenBuddy.au Check (5 photo checks each month). Start my free trial.
• Pro ($7.99 a month or $59 a year), everything in Starter, plus the most GardenBuddy.au Checks (20 photo checks each month), live pest pressure for your postcode including QLD fruit fly, weather-triggered pest alerts, sow-again suggestions worked out from your harvest log, your harvests and care log as a CSV spreadsheet, and the Monthly Vegetable Price Report email. Start my free trial.

Every paid plan starts with a 30 day free trial. Cancel any time. Nothing is charged during the trial. The first payment is taken on day 31, at the price shown for the plan you picked. Cancel any time from your account page, in two clicks. Your garden history stays in your account. Prices are in Australian dollars. We do not refund unused time or change of mind.

Legal

GardenBuddy.au is operated by Dutch Digital Dynamics Pty Limited (ABN 86 081 237 087), a small Australian software company. GST registered, fully Australian owned.