Every good gardener we know keeps a notebook. Not a nice one. A damp exercise book in the shed with a pencil on a string, and in it the date the first bean came off, what the pH was in the north bed, and a note that the bloody possums got the silverbeet again. It is the most valuable thing in the shed and it never gets read, because it is in the shed.
So we moved it. On this moment there is a panel on My Garden called My garden records. It is that notebook, kept next to your beds and plants, and it has one thing the exercise book never had: it talks back.
What you can write down
Forty three kinds of thing, in eleven groups. Soil moisture, pH, soil temperature, what you dug in. When you watered, what the rain gauge caught, how full the tank is. The overnight minimum, a frost, storm damage, the hours of sun a bed actually gets. Sowing, germination, transplant, flowering, first harvest, harvest weight, a health score, a photo, and the day you pulled it out. Fertiliser, foliar spray, compost tea. A pest you saw, what you did about it, and whether it worked. Mulch, cover crops, a rested bed, which family went in last. The compost, turned, temperature, moisture, fed, harvested. Seed in the tin and whether it still germinates. What you spent, how long you spent, what you got back. And a plain diary line for everything else.
We sat down and tried to think like the gardener who wants to know everything and record everything. If we missed one, tell us, it is one line in a registry to add another.
Why you will not see all forty three
Because there is no sense showing a compost thermometer to someone with two pots of lettuce on a balcony. That was the rule we built it around, and it is the part we are most pleased with.
The panel looks at your garden, how many beds, how many plants, how much you have written down and for how long, and works out where you are up to. Then it shows the cards that fit. A brand new member gets four. Someone with beds, plants and a month of readings gets the compost, the tank, rotation and costs. The page says this out loud, right at the top: it is fine not to see everything, the dashboard grows with you, and it follows your way of gardening rather then the other way around.
Nothing is locked, mind. Every card has a hide link, and everything not showing sits in two fold out lists underneath with a turn on button. Want the seed viability card on day one because you have a tin of 2019 tomato seed and a suspicion? Turn it on. The stages are a default, not a wall.
The talking back part
Where a number means something, the card says what. Three words: fine, watch, act.
Soil moisture is the good example. A meter reading of 30 percent is meaningless on its own, sicne a sandy pot and a clay bed give completely different numbers when both are perfectly watered. So the panel does not use a fixed scale if it can help it. Take one reading the morning after a deep soak and that becomes your full mark for that bed. Every reading after it is judged against your own soil, not a textbook.
Same with pH. If we know the crop in that bed, the reading is judged against what that crop likes. 5.6 is a worry under broccoli and perfectly fine under potatoes, and the card knows which bed it is.
Why we built it, honestly
Two reasons, and we will give you both. The first is that your own records are worth more than any calendar we can publish. Three years of first harvest dates from your patch beats our zone table every time, and eventually the site can start using them to tune what it tells you.
The second is that a notebook is the thing that makes a place yours. We would like GardenBuddy.au to be where your garden lives, and it cannot be that if it only holds our data and none of yours.
Plans, and what is not there yet
Free gets a set number of records a month and always keeps your latest reading of each kind. Starter and Pro are unlimited and keep every reading, so this spring can be checked against last. The numbers are on the plan page.
Not there yet: a chart of your readings over time, and the same panel in the app. Both are next. We would rather ship the notebook now and the graph paper a bit later than hold the lot.
Go and write one thing down
Open My Garden, scroll to My garden records, press Add on the moisture card. That is the whole start. The rest arrives as you go.
GardenBuddy.au, built for subtropical vegetable growing at Dayboro, QLD. More about the project.
Published 3 September 2026.
