My garden · set up once, sorted for good
This is where your garden lives.
What is planted, what you watered, what you pulled out of it, and what that would have cost you at Coles. Set your space up once, ground or balcony, and Buddy works out what to plant and when for the exact spot you have. It starts with one question, and it takes thirty seconds.
The free plan tracks one bed and ten plants. No card, no timed trial.
How this works, start to finish
Seven steps. You do not have to do them in order, and most people wander back and forth between them. Garden Buddy follows you through all of it.
Three ways people do this
None of them is the real one. They just need different answers, so it is worth telling me which you are.
A backyard patch
Beds, a strip down the side, pots on the patio. The soil is the ground, or it is sitting on it.
- Space is rarely the binding limit
- Sun is usually good, minus a tree or a fence
- Your real problems are timing, spacing and pests
A balcony or a courtyard
Everything in pots, a wall on one side, a rail on the other, usually a slab overhead. This is not a small garden. It is a different problem.
- You are rationing light, floor space and weight
- Which way it faces decides most of it
- Get the pot wrong and the crop stalls, whatever you feed it
A group, or a shared plot
A community garden, a street of neighbours, a few mates who all grow something different. You still garden in ground or in pots, so pick one of those above. The sharing sits on top.
- Nobody needs six lettuces in the same week
- Split the crops, swap the results
- That part is Grow Together, further down
Set up your space
Pick one. You can change it later, and if you have both a balcony and a patch at ground level, start with whichever you spend more time on.
Setting up your space takes about a minute, and it needs somewhere to save it. Free forever, no card.
Balconies, and the thing nobody tells you
Someone wrote to us about a south facing balcony with no direct sun, a fiddle leaf fig only just hanging on, and a simple question: what could they actually grow out there and eat. We had no good answer, so we went and built one.
Every balcony video on YouTube is filmed on a sunny balcony, which is not much help if yours is not one. I would rather tell you now than have you buy a seedling that was never going to fruit.
Why I ask which way it faces, instead of asking if it is sunny
If I ask you whether your spot is full sun or part shade, I get a guess. If I ask which way it faces and how deep it is, I get geometry, and geometry knows a few things that are not obvious.
A south facing balcony in Australia points away from the sun. When I ran the numbers for a typical one in Brisbane I got a couple of hours of weak, low angle sun either side of midsummer, and nothing at all from about April through to September.
The one that surprised me is the north facing balcony with another balcony above it. It often gets more sun in winter than in summer, because the slab blocks the high summer sun and lets the low winter sun straight in underneath. If you have ever wondered why your basil sulked through summer and your lettuce did fine in June, that is why.
What these numbers are, and what they are not
My sun figures come from solar geometry for your location. They do not know about the gum tree next door, the building across the road, or your neighbour’s shade sail. Treat them as a starting point and check them against what you actually see out there. If they are badly wrong for your spot, tell me and I will look at it.
The weight figures are a rough planning guide only. They are not a structural assessment and they are not a statement that your balcony can safely carry any particular load. I know nothing about your building. Only a structural engineer, your body corporate or your building owner can tell you what a balcony is rated to hold, and only by looking at it. Please ask them before you put weight on one.
Grow Together, the part nobody plans for
Vegetables do not arrive politely. They arrive all at once. You plant a punnet of lettuce, and eight weeks later you have six lettuces in the same week and a fridge that cannot hold them. Meanwhile the person three streets over has forty tomatoes and no greens.
What it actually does
- Lists what you have spare, and what you are short of
- Finds other growers near you who have the opposite problem
- Lets a street, a club or a community garden run as one group
- Keeps it local, because a swap only works if you can drive to it
Who it suits
- Anyone whose garden produces in gluts, which is everyone
- Balcony growers, who cannot grow variety but can grow herbs well
- Community gardens wanting one place to coordinate
- Neighbours who already swap over the fence and want it organised
Have a look at Grow Together
See the groups already going, or start one for your street. Free with any account.
The Garden Buddy app
Plan beds on a drag and drop map that prices your harvest, search pests and remedies, and snap a photo for GardenBuddy Check pest ID. Works on your phone, even with patchy reception in the patch.