Log a harvest
A harvest is any time you pull food off a plant to eat, cook with, preserve, or give away. Log every one. The ROI report is only as good as the weight data you put in.
Why logging every harvest matters
The ROI report is only as good as the weight data you put in. Skip a harvest and that week’s dollar value is wrong. Skip many and the whole grow-vs-buy comparison becomes meaningless.
Three specific benefits of consistent logging:
- Accurate ROI. Every harvest × today’s shop price = today’s grown-value. Miss harvests, miss dollars.
- Crop performance tracking. “Broccoli gave me 2.4 kg total across 4 plants” — meaningful only if you weighed every pick. Guessing afterwards is unreliable.
- Year-over-year comparison. This autumn’s kale yielded more than last autumn’s — only provable if both years were logged.
How to log
- Navigate to /my-garden/. Scroll to “Record a harvest” (the fifth section).
- Select the plant. Dropdown shows all active plants with their bed and crop name — e.g. “Kale – Tuscan Black (Raised – Front)”.
- Enter weight. Number in grams or kilograms. Toggle the unit right next to the input — “450” + “grams” = 0.45 kg stored.
- Set the date. Defaults to today. Change if you picked yesterday and are logging this morning.
- Pick quality. Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor. Subjective but useful for spotting patterns.
- (Optional) Add notes. “First pick of the season”, “side shoots”, “heat-damaged outer leaves, inner still good”.
- Click Log Harvest. Harvest appears in history and ROI updates immediately.
Weighing tips
- Any cheap digital kitchen scale works — $15 at Kmart. You don’t need a bench scale.
- Weigh clean produce (soil off, damaged leaves trimmed). Gives consistent numbers and matches how shops price per kg.
- Weigh in a bowl, tare first. Place the empty bowl on the scale, press tare to zero, add the produce — reads the produce weight only.
- For wet produce (spinach, silverbeet after rain), shake or towel-dry briefly first. A wet bunch can weigh 20–30% more than a dry one.
- Ballpark for bunch crops. Spring onions, coriander, rocket are sold by the bunch at shops (~80–150 g each). Weigh your actual bunch; the system treats it as weight but shop price is per-kg anyway.
What gets calculated automatically
- Harvest appears in your Harvest history table immediately — newest at top.
- ROI report updates. Total weight up, total dollar value up (by weight × today’s shop average $/kg).
- Running total per crop. If you’ve picked the same crop before, the per-crop summary adds the new weight.
- Growth stage progresses. Harvest activity advances the plant’s growth stage towards “harvest” if it wasn’t already there.
Honest note about price data
Some crops (kale, silverbeet, bok choy) aren’t consistently priced by weight at Australian supermarkets — they’re sold by the bunch (~$3.50 per 150 g bunch = ~$23/kg equivalent). Our scrapers capture what’s available, but per-kg data for these crops is thin and the ROI figure will undersell what you’ve grown.
Pro tier members can override price-per-kg on a per-crop basis in their settings. Starter tier uses our scraped average; if your kale ROI looks low, that’s why — not because the crop failed.
Deleting or editing a harvest
Hover any row in the Harvest history table. An edit pencil and delete cross appear on the right.
- Edit — fix a weight typo, adjust quality rating, add notes you forgot. All linked calculations (ROI, running totals) recalculate automatically.
- Delete — remove an accidental duplicate, or a harvest logged against the wrong plant. Prefer edit to delete when possible — historical record has value even when imperfect.
Common scenarios
“I harvested 6 leaves from my kale — is that worth logging?”
Weigh them. If it’s 50 g+, log it. Sub-50g picks are optional but if you’re serious about the ROI number, log even small picks — they add up across a season.
“I ate the baby leaves while thinning — do I log that?”
Yes, if you weighed them. “Thinned seedlings, 80g baby leaves, salad tonight” is a legit harvest. Most growers never capture this — it’s one of the reasons home-garden ROI is usually under-reported.
“I gave produce to a neighbour — does that count?”
Yes. You grew it, it came off your plants, it has the same dollar value whether you ate it or gifted it. Log it with a note — “gave to Sarah next door” — so you remember where it went.
“Some of the broccoli heads were buggy — do I weigh before or after trimming?”
After trimming to the part you’d actually eat. Buggy outer florets get cut off in a real kitchen; the shop price you’re comparing against is for the clean usable produce.