Record watering, fertilising and mulching
Garden Buddy tracks what you do to your garden, not just what comes out of it. Every watering, feeding, mulch, pest check, observation. The care log is the single most valuable reference you’ll build over years of growing.
Types of care events
Twelve care types covered. Each captures what you did, when, with what product, and the weather at the time.
| Type | What gets logged | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Watering | Litres applied, water source, weather | “20 L from rainwater tank, morning soak, sunny 28 °C” |
| Fertilising | Product, dilution rate, quantity | “Seasol + Powerfeed 1:10, 500 mL diluted, applied to broccoli + kale” |
| Mulching | Material, depth, area covered | “Sugar-cane mulch 5 cm thick, front raised bed, 1 bale (24 L)” |
| Soil prep | Digging, amendments, pH work | “Dug in 2 bags cow manure + blood & bone, raked flat” |
| Pest check | What you saw (or didn’t) | “Weekly pest scout — no cabbage white eggs found” |
| Pest treatment | Product applied, target pest | “Yates Dipel BT 15 mL in 5 L, applied to all brassicas” |
| Weeding | Bed, primary weeds removed | “Removed bindii and nutgrass runners, back bed” |
| Sowing | Crop, row/depth/spacing, seed source | “Direct-sowed Fordhook silverbeet, 2 cm deep, 25 cm spacing” |
| Transplanting | From punnet to bed | “Transplanted 6 broccoli seedlings (punnet-raised 3 weeks)” |
| Harvesting | Linked to a harvest record | “First broccoli head cut — 450 g” |
| Repotting | Pot size change, media | “Moved spring onions from 15 cm to 25 cm pot” |
| Observation | Anything else worth noting | “Good overnight rain — 14 mm. No watering needed today.” |
How to log
The care log section on /my-garden/ shows your recent events and has an Add entry button. The form fields:
- Care type — pick from the dropdown (the 12 types above).
- Date / time — defaults to now.
- Plant — optional. Tag a specific plant if the event applies to one crop.
- Bed — optional. If no plant tagged, tag the bed. If the event covers the whole garden, leave both blank.
- Description — short free text. “Morning soak after 3 dry days”, “Applied Seasol + Powerfeed 1:10”.
- Product used — brand + name. “Yates Dipel BT”, “Searles Premium Manure”.
- Quantity used — “20 L watering can”, “500 mL diluted”, “half a bale”.
- Weather — Sunny / Cloudy / Rain / Humid overcast / Cool. Quick tick from a dropdown.
- Temperature — soil or air temperature in °C. Optional but useful.
How often to log
Realistically: every time you do something meaningful in the garden. That’s 2–4 times per week for an active grower in autumn-winter; 3–6 per week in peak summer with more watering.
Skip: tiny things like picking a single leaf of parsley, a quick hose-down of a pot. Log: anything you’d want to remember in six months when a plant does unexpectedly well or badly.
Most useful insights from the care log appear after 60 days of entries. By then you have enough events to spot patterns — “every time I mulched in the first week of warm weather, pests stayed low”. Before 60 days, you’re just building the database. After, it’s genuinely useful.
Weather and temperature — not actually optional
These fields look optional. They’re not, if you want the care log to deliver real insights.
“I watered on 4 March” is low-information. “I watered on 4 March during a 28 °C sunny afternoon, and the plants still wilted the next day” is actionable — it tells future-you the bed drainage is poor, or the mulch layer is thin, or the wilt was temporary heat stress.
If logging weather every time feels tedious, three seconds of tick-a-box suffices — Sunny / Cloudy / Rain. Temperature captures the better story but skipping it isn’t fatal.
Example: a care log that revealed a mulch problem
After 3 months of watering entries, a member noticed their front bed needed water 3× per week while the back bed only needed it once. Both beds had the same crop, same soil, same sun exposure. The difference? The back bed had been mulched at week 2; the front at week 6. That one delay cost them 4 weeks of extra watering labour. Without the log they’d never have spotted it.
Auto-tagging weather (future feature)
Garden Buddy has a local weather data source — the Dayboro Ecowitt weather station and others as we expand. The system will eventually auto-tag weather and temperature from the timestamp on your entry. For now you tick a box; in future it fills automatically from the nearest station to your registered zone.
Editing and deleting care entries
Hover over any entry in the care log. Edit and delete icons appear. Edit to fix a typo, add a note you forgot, correct a product name. Delete for genuine mistakes only — the historical record has more value than a clean-looking list.