If you’re like us, you need a little help when it comes to gardening. Even the greenest thumb needs to hit the books every now and again when flowers and plants start to fail and when fruits and veggies stall. Thankfully, a multitude of gardening apps can help you make the most of your garden, whether you’re growing tomatoes, flowers, or nutritious vegetables.
From apps that help you catalog your garden to helpful guides on how to make the most of your harvest, we’ve curated the best gardening apps available today.
Find out the name of any flower you see in your neighborhood or in a walk through the park with What’s That Flower? Choose a flower’s color, habitat, and number of petals, and your options narrow from more than 1,000 items, after which you can browse the list to identify the flower you see. You can also use the app to help you pick which flowers you want to plant in your own garden. You need an internet connection to run this app, and removing ads costs $1. Searching by photo costs $3, though — or just use the app’s basic features free of charge.
This popular gardening app — great for design inspiration — is home to a large community of friendly gardeners who are quick to offer care advice, identification help, and handy tips. You can keep a photographic journal of your garden and get reminders about pruning, or advice on the best spots for growth. You can also search the encyclopedia, see what’s popular, and follow other gardeners when you find plants and gardens that you really like. Recent versions add plant recognition features to help you quickly identify plants. Just point GardenTags at a flower or leaf and select Identify and Add plant, and the app will find the plant name. The app also updated how to manage privacy and communication settings and let you set up your gardening task schedule according to your climate. Premium users on monthly, annual, or six-month plans can now change the season or frequency of various plant care tasks. Updated versions offer pinch and zoom gestures for plant and garden photos, the ability to date stamp your photos, and new badges added to your profile.
Moon & Garden takes a unique lunar approach to planting and harvesting fruits, vegetables, and herbs in your organic garden. Using a biodynamic method, the app relies on the phases of the moon to advise you of actions you can take in caring for your garden for the following day. The app approaches gardening from a position that plants depend on lunar phases like full moon or new moon for successful sowing, repotting, transplanting, and harvesting, depending on the type of fruit, flower, or leaf you have. The app reveals not only the current phase of the moon and the zodiac sign, but also the weather forecast for determining optimal gardening conditions. The app lets you schedule your gardening tasks with its reminder feature and share your pictures with other Moon & Garden users via the Community feature. The app is free, but for $1 you can remove ads. The new version lets you sign in via Google or Facebook.
GrowIt allows you to join an enthusiastic community of gardeners, helping you to find inspiration, gather information, and share your own cultivations with the world. This gardening app is good if you want to find out what plants will grow well in your local area. You’ll also find useful advice cataloged in projects or you can add your own. You can even ask the community to help you identify specific plants and rate other people’s gardens and check out the most beautiful ones out there if you seek more ideas. Recent upgrades let you zoom in on plant cards and images in questions for easier horticultural identification, share a plant card, navigate to another member’s profile, and get updated search results, improved mapping, and more. New features include videos, letting you offer a tour of your houseplants. Share a 360-degree view of that mystery item in your yard and get ID help from the community.
With Garden Answers Plant Identifier, you can snap a photo of a plant you want to identify and submit it to the app’s experts to find out what it is. It can automatically recognize more than 20,000 plants and if it can’t identify the plant in question, you can pay $2 to get an expert identification from a botanist with additional information and advice on its care. This app also identifies pests and has a robust Q&A section that covers more than 200,000 of the most common gardening queries. Recent updates expand the community function by letting you share your questions with the app’s Garden Answers community, in addition to streamlined plant ID and onboarding features, ad-free service, the ability to access all your questions and answers within the app, and enhanced answers to questions. Thanks to new plant recognition technology, the app promises instant answers to your questions.
Gardenize helps you keep track of all the plants in your garden and offers information on how to care for them, including location, crop rotation, and yearly tracking of plants and crops. You can keep notes and photos of your plants in a single place. A dynamic news feed gives you perspective on how to keep your garden beautiful and healthy. Different sections of the app specialize in plants, types of flower beds or raised beds, and tasks such as watering, fertilizing, or harvesting. Document your plant development from seed to full-grown plant, track the condition of the soil and duration of sunlight, and keep a running narrative of your garden with up-to-date photos. You can create a public or private account so friends can follow you and you can track gardens worldwide. The most recent version lets you use the app to drop in on your friends’ gardens as well as public gardens. The app is free; however, if you want to export or download your information, you can choose to pay for up to 30 exports as PDFs, spreadsheets, or photo galleries.
This app, previously called PlantSnapp, is targeted to both gardeners general plant owners. It features a huge plant library, but the real attraction is the ability to snap and upload a picture of a plant — or pest — and have an expert gardener identify it for you. It also allows you to add your plants to the app and generate a care calendar, which will send you notifications and remind you of what you need to do each month to order to keep your plants healthy. Connecting with plant experts is a premium feature, but you do get free stuff both when you download the app and every month, so you can connect to the experts even without a monthly, quarterly, or annual premium account. SmartPlant has teamed up with several commercial vendors so that if you scan plant barcodes at retail partners, you get all kinds of goodies like monthly care, or a free premium membership trial, and more. New versions have improved the interactivity of the care calendar so you can now tick off your tasks to give your plants the care they need.
If you want a simple calendar for planting garden vegetables, Gardenate might be the perfect solution. An assortment of practical hints and tips accompany the calendar. Using this app, you can plan your garden, set a schedule, and find detailed information on different vegetables. You can also use the Planting Now tab for inspiration on what to plant each month. The app offers details for growing nearly 100 popular garden vegetables, with specific planting information for the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The best part is that all the info is on your phone, so there’s no internet necessary. The app is minimalist and straightforward, making it a refreshing alternative to many social media-style gardening apps. The Share your Garden feature can also sync your information and notes with your other phones and tablets if you wish. A massive update also means Gardenate is now a universal app for both tablets and smartphones. Another aspect of the update helps streamline the recording process. The app pre-selects your recent garden bed when you begin planting or adding to your wish list. You’ll also notice enhanced visibility for sowing, seed trays, and growing when you add your favorite plants.
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