We are going to start doing something a bit different on the blog. Most weeks, one short story about how someone actually uses GardenBuddy.au. Not a feature list, a story. This first one is ours, and it starts with an embarrassing admission: for the first month one of the team had an account with nothing in it. A postcode, a good intention, and an empty My Garden page.
The empty account problem
It turns out that is normal. When we looked at our own numbers this week, most free members were on this moment in exactly that spot. Signed up, had a look around, and never told the site a single thing about their garden. Which is a shame, because with nothing in it the site can only talk in general. It cannot tell you your tomatoes are two weeks from picking, because it does not know you have tomatoes.
So here is what finally got us going, and it took about four minutes.
One bed
We made one bed. Not the whole garden, one bed. Ours was the raised bed by the tank, sicne that is the one we walk past every morning and the one that actually gets watered. In GardenBuddy.au a bed is just a name and a rough size, and a single pot on a balcony counts exactly the same. The site does not care whether it is a Bunnings planter or a quarter acre, it only cares that something exists to hang plants off.
Three plants
Then we added three plants that were already in that bed: a cherry tomato, a row of bush beans, and a basil that had self seeded from last year and was doing better than anything we planted on purpose. Each one took a name and a rough planting date. If you do not remember the date, guess. A guess is worth far more to the site than a blank.
Three is not a magic number, it is just enough for the site to have something to say. And it started saying it the same week.
What changed from the next Friday
The Gardener’s Weekly Digest stopped being a general planting list and became a note about our bed. The tomato showed up as flowering with a “look for fruit set” line. The beans got a watering reminder because the week ahead looked dry. The basil got a price watch line we did not expect: at the shops that week it was one of the dearest herbs per kilo, which made the self seeded one feel like a small win.
The tasks list on My Garden filled itself in. Not with everything a textbook says you should do, just with what fits those three plants at that stage in our climate zone. And the pest notes narrowed from “things that can happen in Queensland” to “things that go for tomatoes and beans in late September”. That last one eventually saved the tomato, because we went looking for fruit fly a week earlier than we otherwise would have.
The point
Everything personal on GardenBuddy.au, free or paid, runs off what you have told it about your garden. One bed and three plants is the smallest amount that makes all of it wake up. You do not need the whole garden in there. You do not need it to be tidy. You need one bed you actually look at, and the three things growing in it right now.
If you have an empty account, no judgement from us, we had one too. Open My Garden whenever you have four spare minutes. And if you have a story like this of your own, reply to any of our emails. A person reads them, and we would like to tell yours next.
Happy growing, from the GardenBuddy.au team.
