User guide · running your garden · 7 min read
The log you will be glad you kept in three seasons.
GardenBuddy.au tracks what you do to your garden, not just what comes out of it. Every watering, feed, mulch and prune, one tap each. The care log is the single most valuable reference you’ll build over years of growing.
Ten seconds after you water is all it takes. Nobody logs it properly from memory.
Types of care events
Four care types covered: watering, fertilising, mulching and pruning. Each entry records what you did, which plant, and the exact date and time. Deliberately lightweight, an entry takes one tap, so it actually gets logged.
| Type | What it covers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Watering | Any deliberate watering of a plant | “Morning soak of the broccoli after 3 dry days” |
| Fertilising | Any feed, liquid or solid | “Seasol + Powerfeed on the broccoli and kale” |
| Mulching | Topping up or laying mulch | “Sugar-cane mulch on the front raised bed” |
| Pruning | Trimming, pinching out, removing leaves | “Took the lower leaves off the tomatoes” |
How to log
From the plant list on /my-garden/, every active plant has one-tap care buttons next to its name:
- 💧 Watered, one tap logs a watering event for that plant, timestamped now.
- 🌿 Fed, one tap logs a fertilising event for that plant, timestamped now.
The button flashes a tick (“✓ Watered” or “✓ Fed”) to confirm the entry saved. That’s the whole workflow. There is no form to fill in: each entry stores the care type, the plant it belongs to, and the date and time. Mulching and pruning events are supported by the same care log underneath, so they appear in your exported history alongside watering and feeding.
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 context
Care entries don’t record the weather; they record the timestamp, and the timestamp is what makes the log useful next to weather data.
“I watered on 4 March” on its own is low-information. Line it up against what the weather did that week and it becomes actionable: if you watered through a 28 °C sunny stretch and the plants still wilted, future-you knows the bed drainage is poor, the mulch layer is thin, or it was temporary heat stress.
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)
GardenBuddy.au has a local weather data source, our own Ecowitt weather station in South East Queensland and others as we expand. The plan is to eventually auto-tag weather and temperature onto each entry from its timestamp, using the nearest station to your registered zone. That is not built yet, today an entry carries type, plant and time only.
Getting your care log out
Care entries can’t be edited or deleted from the page once logged, so tap the button when you actually do the job, not from memory the next day. On Pro, the Export your data section at the bottom of /my-garden/ has a Download care log CSV button: the full history as a plain CSV (date, care type, plant, variety, bed, notes) for your own spreadsheets.
