Authors ask for their zone and the actual start of planting to be taken into account. A useful test is adding a crop that has already been planted and correcting the dates for your own plot.
Which apps people use
These apps are mentioned in the breakdown of this job. Open each one to compare strengths and limits. The order of the list is not a ranking of fitness.
Rank 2. Review score: 72 out of 100. App Store rating: 4.8★ · 9,214 ratings
72of 100
A real vegetable garden planning tool with educational videos from the team and concrete advice on sowing and care. The main limitations are product-level: no watering reminders, poor support for large beds and containers.
Praised: Users grew their first harvest from scratch and learned gardening through the built-in guides and the team's YouTube support.
Complaints: No watering or fertilizing reminders, bed size is limited, and container growing is not supported.
Best for: The beginner gardener planning traditional in-ground rows
Rank 7. Review score: 62 out of 100. App Store rating: 4.7★ · 420 ratings
62of 100
A strong seasonal garden planner that auto-generates tasks by crop and reschedules when dates shift. The main weakness is that planting dates sometimes miss the mark for local conditions, and the mobile interface scales poorly on iPad.
Praised: Automatic task rescheduling when a planting date changes saves gardeners a lot of manual work.
Complaints: Hard to use if you have already planted something: the app is designed for starting from scratch.
Best for: Gardeners who plan their season in advance and want a structured task calendar
Rank 13. Review score: 55 out of 100. App Store rating: 4.3★ · 3,873 ratings
55of 100
A niche garden planner with companion planting logic and sowing schedules. Real fans use it for years to manage crop rotation. Weak spots: no automatic zone detection and an incomplete crop database.
Praised: Companion planting and crop rotation logic works and helps plan bed layouts for the season.
Complaints: No automatic planting zone detection, and many basic vegetables are missing from the database.
Best for: Gardeners with raised beds or a greenhouse
Rank 25. Review score: 40 out of 100. App Store rating: 4.7★ · 13,269 ratings
40of 100
A garden planner with a visual bed layout and watering schedule, but weather data is regularly wrong: after 100mm of rain it still tells you to water. The crop variety database is thin, and agronomic advice is sometimes incorrect, such as squash family sowing recommendations.
Praised: Visual garden layout with companion planting helps plan bed arrangements.
Complaints: Weather integration is unreliable, making the watering schedule more harmful than helpful.
Best for: Gardener who needs a visual bed layout tool
Rank 20. Review score: 48 out of 100. App Store rating: 4.6★ · 398 ratings
48of 100
The concept is right: a planting calendar localized by climate zone with a task list. But recommended dates are sometimes off by a month from reality, and the app regularly loses data after updates.
Praised: Users appreciate that the app adapts the planting schedule to their specific region.
Complaints: The crop list is limited, has no search, and adding a non-standard plant is impossible.
Best for: Beginning gardeners in US climate zones who can tolerate occasional data loss
