Whether you’re an absolute novice in the garden or a green-thumbed ninja, there are remarkable apps out there to help you grow better food, raise healthier plants, and expand your botanical skills tremendously. Gardening is a pursuit for everyone! Even if you’re an apartment-dweller with minimal outdoor space, there are gadgets and indoor gardening solutions galore to help you enjoy nurturing plants.
What we’ve done here is collect a nice sampling of top-of-the-line gardening apps for your use. If you’re planning your garden, looking for pest solutions, or seeking expertise, some of this software can be absolutely brilliant. Looking for more information? We also have an excellent guide to indoor herb gardening and more in-depth app roundups for both Android and iPhone owners.
Note that all of the apps described below (with one exception) are downloadable to both Android and iOS devices.
Garden Tags
Garden Tags is a community-oriented gardening app. Its popularity has helped it become more useful thanks to its thriving, friendly user base. Garden Tags users share advice on plant care, solve identification riddles, and provide handy tips. The app allows you to assemble a photographic journal charting your garden’s growth; it can also remind you about care tasks like pruning and give useful advice on garden planning. The app includes an extensive plant encyclopedia, popularity data based on other users, and plant-specific connections to other gardeners who may be able to help you. Garden Tags is a particularly good app for finding garden design inspiration.
GrowIt!
Grow it is another gardening app with a strong user base and a heavy bias toward communal support between gardeners. You can share your own successes, look for inspiration, and learn useful information. GrowIt! is particularly useful for identifying the plants that will thrive in your local climate. A vast storehouse of advice is organized by individual gardeners’ projects; you can contribute your own to the collection. The app allows you to rate other gardeners’ work, find ideas from the best of the best, and ask for help with tasks like identifying specific plants.
Garden Answers Plant Identifier
Solving the mystery of a strange plant is as easy as taking a picture and submitting it to Garden Answers Plant Identifier. This is an automated process that delivers quick results, and its performance is really quite exceptional. It’s capable of identifying over 20,000 plants. If the automated process doesn’t work, you can get comprehensive identification and care advice from a botanist right through the app. This portion of the service costs $2. The app also helps with pest identification and includes a Q&A database that can answer more than 200,000 frequently-asked gardening questions.
SmartPlant (Subscription Service)
Like many of its competitors, SmartPlant includes a vast library of plant information. It also allows you to get plants and pests identified by sharing a picture with the app’s experts gardeners. Further features include the ability to track your own plants and create care calendars. These calendars send automatic notifications to make sure that you give your plants all of the attention they need and your water features are cared for – this water fountain guidebook can help this too. You can try out SmartPlant by submitting a few photos free of charge. The app’s full functionality needs to be unlocked with a subscription, though; this costs $6 per month or $35 per year). SmartPlant was created by merging with Garden Compass; the app was originally launched as PlantSnapp.
Gardenate ($1)
If your primary interest in a gardening app is creating a robust calendar, then Gardenate is definitely worth a closer look. It doesn’t just give you a planting calendar; the app also includes a wide array of hints and tips. Gardenate is an excellent planning tool that will help you organize a garden, schedule vital care tasks, access in-depth vegetable care information, and get month-by-month “Planting Now” suggestions. Gardenate is a simple, straightforward app with a minimalist design. It’s a particularly attractive option to gardeners who aren’t interested in the social media-type approach taken by so many gardening apps. Gardenate is for iOS only; if you have an Android device, take a look at Gardroid.