The bed remembers what was in it, now the dashboard does too

There is a bed at the back of one of our gardens that has grown tomatoes since two seasons, and this winter the third lot came up with the leaves curling and the lower fruit going soft at the base. Nothing wrong wiht the plants. Everything wrong with the bed. The soil remembered what had been in it, and we had not.

That is the whole reason for what went onto My Garden today. Every planting has a Companions button now, and every bed says what to put in it next.

Four lines per crop

Press the button and the card opens. What the crop grows well with. What to keep it away from, and why, because “keep potato away from tomato” is useless until you know it is the same blight and the same beetle. What should have been in the bed before it. What to plant in the bed after it comes out.

The before and after are the old four turn rotation, legumes then greens and brassicas then fruiting crops then roots and alliums, then round again. Nothing new, every decent gardening book has it. What is new is that it is sitting under the actual tomato in the actual bed instead of on page 40 of a book in the shed.

The bed knows what came out of it

Each bed on your dashboard carries a line: when the capsicum comes out, plant roots and alliums. Or, if the bed is empty: last held broccoli, plant fruiting crops next. It reads what is in there now, what you have finished, and any rotation family record you made on that bed.

And the add plant form does a control while you type. Pick the bed, type tomato, and before you press Add it tells you if the potatoes are still in there, or if nightshades held that bed inside the last three turns. In orange, so you see it. It does not stop you. We would never do that, half the best gardens we know break the rotation on purpose. It just makes it a decision rather than a surprise in August.

Where it comes from

All 104 crops in the growing guides have a sheet. The companion lists are the ones from the guides and the companion chart, the rotation group for each crop we set by hand. In the begin we thought about letting the site guess for a name it did not know. We did not. If we do not recognise the plant, you get no card and no check, rather than a confident wrong answer.

It is reference data, so it is free on every plan. There is no upsell on knowing that fennel is a bad neighbour.

GardenBuddy.au, built for subtropical vegetable growing at Dayboro, QLD. More about the project.

Published 15 September 2026.