User guide · getting started · 6 min read
Everything it does, and why it works that way.
GardenBuddy.au is a private vegetable growing journal for Australian home growers. It tracks every bed, every plant, every watering and every harvest, then compares what you grow against today’s supermarket prices, so you can see in real dollars what your plot is actually producing.
Six minutes to read. After this you will know whether the rest of the guide is worth your time.
What problem this solves
We started building this because we kept hitting the same four problems. Every grower we talked to had them too, usually within the first couple of seasons:
- Seed packets and YouTube tutorials are written for UK and US conditions. We found the timing is wrong for Brisbane, and wildly wrong for Townsville or Hobart.
- You can’t remember when you last planted broccoli, what variety did well last year, or whether your kale really produced enough to justify the space it takes up.
- You have no idea whether growing your own actually saves money, or just feels good while you spend $40 on seedlings to grow $12 worth of lettuce.
- Pest treatments are a guessing game. You spray something, it works or not, and a year later you can’t remember what worked on what.
We built GardenBuddy.au to solve those four problems. Everything in the product flows from them.
The four core capabilities
1. A private garden journal
The garden journal tracks every bed, every plant, every watering, every fertiliser, every harvest, every pest observation. The data layer underneath My Garden has dedicated tables for gardens, beds, plants, harvests, care events and pest observations. All queries are scoped to your user ID at the database level. Nobody else sees your garden data, and we can’t either without your explicit permission.
After 60 days of consistent logging, patterns emerge. After 180, you have a reference you couldn’t recreate any other way. After 365, you’re comparing this autumn to last autumn at the crop level. That’s what we find most useful about our own demo garden at the moment.
2. Live Australian supermarket prices
We run an automated price collector that reads Woolworths (API), Coles, Aldi and IGA every morning from 10am AEST, capturing 93 vegetables. Our system computes a per retailer price and a four retailer average for every crop, and the site updates at noon AEST. Null rate across all four retailers: 0.8%.
This is what drives the ROI number. Grown kilograms times today’s average $/kg equals the dollar value of your garden output. We reckon that’s the number most growers actually want to see.
3. Planting calendar by growing zone
Australia has seven distinct growing zones based on local conditions. We’ve mapped 156+ crops across all seven, giving 728 individual “this crop in this zone” pages with month by month planting windows, soil temperatures, days to harvest, companion plants and pest warnings. Free, no signup, indexed by Google.
The free /plant-now/ tool filters to crops plantable this month in your zone. If you haven’t had a look at it yet, that’s where we’d start.
4. Personalised weekly digest
Sunday morning email built for your zone, your plants, this week’s weather forecast, and current price movements. Six sections: weather, plant now, harvest now, pest alerts, price movements, and moon planting notes. The weekly digest goes to every tier, Free included. What steps up on the paid tiers is the GardenBuddy.au Advisor note written for your garden: Free gets none, Starter gets it weekly, and Pro gets it every morning.
We won’t pretend it’s for everyone. It’s useful if you’d read a weekly email but wouldn’t remember to log in otherwise. That’s eventually the right fit for a lot of growers we’ve spoken to.
Who it’s for, and who it isn’t
Built for
- Australian home growers with at least one bed, container or patch of dirt
- Beginners who don’t know when to plant what
- Experienced growers who want serious data on their own plot
- People who like numbers, yields, costs, weather correlations
- Anyone tired of UK and US gardening advice applied blindly to an Australian garden
Not built for
- Commercial market gardeners, wrong scale and pricing model
- Overseas gardeners, price and zone data is Australia only
- People who want a phone app, web only for now
- People who won’t weigh harvests, the ROI math depends on weights
- Anyone allergic to record keeping, value is proportional to what you log
The product gets more useful the more you use it. Week 1 you have a bed and a plant, interesting but thin. Week 8 you have a care log, three harvests and an ROI number, and the data is actually useful. Week 24 you have a full season’s worth of data, and that’s impossible to recreate without having logged it along the way. We think that’s worth saying upfront so you know what you’re signing up for.
How to read this guide
Five parts, 30 articles. We’d suggest reading in order if you’re starting fresh, or jumping to what you’re stuck on if you’re already inside.
| Part | Articles | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | 7 | Plan choice, demo tour, signup, first login, My Garden orientation |
| Running your garden | 9 | Adding beds, planting, care log, harvests, pests, ROI, history, Grow Together |
| Features and tools | 7 | Weekly digest, email prefs, Plant Now, prices, per veggie pages, zones, almanac |
| Weather and pest alerts | 2 | Live pest pressure, your postcode and zone |
| Help and account | 5 | FAQ, troubleshooting, billing, contact |
If you only read three pages
Read this one (you’re here), See it working (a tour of our live demo garden), and A tour of My Garden. Those three tell you whether the product fits how you garden, and where to start when you sign up. We’d read them in that order.