Field notes for a small garden
A companion for planning, tracking, and caring for the garden you actually have. Draw your beds, log what you planted, and check whether a plant is safe for the cat or the dog before it goes in the ground.
Coming to the App Store. Not there yet.
Available now
Two jobs sit at the heart of the app, and both work today. You keep a map of where your plants are, and you keep the facts about each one close by. It opens with the fact you most want to get right: whether a plant is poisonous to your pets.
Built for iPhone. Drawn to feel like paper, not a dashboard.
The part that matters most
A surprising number of ordinary plants are toxic to cats and dogs. Lilies. Sago palm. The pothos on the shelf. CarterGarden tells you per pet, using the ASPCA's lists of toxic and non-toxic plants.
Common names are messy. "Tulip" can mean the toxic bulb or a perfectly safe tree. When the name is ambiguous, the app does not pick the cheerful answer and move on. It shows the cautious one and asks which plant you actually have. When a plant is not in the data, it says so rather than guessing it safe.
Example, to show the idea. The app checks the real ASPCA data.
On the grid
A garden is not a list. It is squares of dirt in a particular order. So you draw yours: add beds at the edges, drop in the plants you have logged, and read the whole thing at a glance. Your layout is saved, so it is there the next time you open the app. Plant the same thing in the next square over and the beds join into one, the way they look when you stand at the end of the row.
Gridlines stay on at every zoom, so it always reads like a plot.
Your plants
Log each plant with the things you will want later: a name, the variety, whether it is in a pot or in the ground, the day you planted it, and a notes line for whatever else matters. That record is what the garden map and the pet-safety check draw on.
A short, honest record. No fields you will never fill in.
Weather
When you open the app, it reads your local forecast against what you are growing and points out a freeze, a frost, heat, or high wind on the way, with the plants most at risk named first. A cold night is a different morning than a hot, dry week, so it shows the ones that care about each.
Forecast from OpenWeather, read against your beds. It shows when you open the app, and needs the weather service switched on.
On the way
These are the direction of the app, not part of it yet. They are here so you know where it is headed. Nothing in this section is in the current build.
Watering and seasonal timing, so the right nudge lands on the right day.
Point the camera at something growing and get a name to start from.
Photograph a sick or struggling plant and get help working out what is wrong.
Aim the camera at a nursery tag and have the plant filled in from the printed text. Today the scanner is a demo that drops in a sample, so it cannot read your tag yet.
Growing guides, seasonal calendars, companions, and common problems, per plant.
