Our story
A garden is a year-long conversation. We built a place to keep it.
Garden Journal started as a tool for one garden and one simple wish: to remember. What was planted where, what the back bed looked like last June, which pepper actually did well. It grew into a calm, private journal that a small circle of gardeners now opens every day.
Where it started
Every gardener keeps a journal somewhere: a notebook that gets muddy, a camera roll full of unlabeled tomatoes, a memory that is sure it planted the garlic in October. The apps we tried wanted to run the garden for us, with schedules and reminders and a chore list. None of them simply remembered.
So we made the thing we wanted. Snap a photo, say one sentence, and let the app do the organizing: name the plant, file the entry to the right bed, and hand it back a year later when the same spot comes around again. That loop, capture then recall, is the whole idea. Everything else in the app exists to serve it.
What we believe
Record and recall, not chores
Most garden apps are schedulers that nag. A journal is different: capture should be effortless, and looking back should feel like a reward — the same bed a year ago, the tomato that did best, the first frost date you forgot.
AI in the background
The AI names the plant, bug, bird, or disease and writes a tidy caption so you don't have to. It does the boring parts and then gets out of the way. It never posts, nudges, or decides for you.
Private by default
Your photos and notes are yours alone. We keep only your ZIP code for weather and zone tips, serve photos through short-lived signed links, and run no ads and no trackers.
Calm, and built to last
One quiet home screen, a few clear places for things, and no feed. It installs to your phone, works with no signal, and is designed to be worth opening season after season, year after year.
How it's built
Garden Journal is a web app that installs to your phone like any other app and keeps working when the signal drops. Photos are shrunk on your device before they ever leave it, stored privately, and shown to you alone. The AI is real, vision and text, and kept on a tight budget on purpose: care guides and zone tips are shared and cached, the built-in Library answers most lookups for free, and the expert assistant has a daily cap. Small, careful, and cheap to run means it can stay quiet and stay around.
What we're doing
We ship in small steps and write down what the gardeners using it tell us. Here is where things stand.
Shipped
- Photo capture with AI identification of plants, bugs, birds, and diseases
- Your garden by area, by the plants you track, by month, and by year
- A Garden Map: arrange your beds and plan each one square by square
- Harvest log, weather and frost warnings, and this-week tips for your zone
- A built-in Library of common plants and problems that works offline
- A weekly story of your garden, written for you every Sunday
- Ask the expert — short, on-topic gardening answers
- Full data export and account deletion, so your garden is always yours
Right now
- Listening to a small circle of invited gardeners who use it every day, and shipping what they ask for
- Making the public side of the site tell our story properly
- Finishing the terms and privacy policy that let us welcome strangers
Next
- Opening the doors in stages, beyond invite-only
- A native iPhone app built from the same journal
- Year-over-year memory for the Garden Map: what grew where, and how it did
Who we are
Garden Journal is made by Garced Dev, an independent software studio. We are small on purpose. There is no growth team, no engagement dashboard, and nobody whose job is to make you open the app more often. The measure we care about is whether, a year from now, the journal still feels like yours.
We are invite-only while we grow. If you were invited, welcome — sign in and step back into your garden. If you weren't yet, we are opening the doors in stages, and this page is where we will say when.