About Milpa
Milpa Gardens is a free garden planner that gives advice only where it can back it up. Each piece of advice comes from a rule, and each rule says why it works and how strong the evidence is.
Who makes it
Milpa is a small independent project run by one maintainer. Much of its code and writing was drafted with an AI language model. A person reviews each change before it goes live, and only a person can mark a source as read.
Why it exists
A lot of garden advice comes with no reason attached, and some of it is folklore. Milpa plans your beds, dates your sowing from your own frost dates and keeps a record of what grew where. Each step shows the reason behind it, so you can judge it for yourself.
The evidence promise
- Every rule names the reason it works in one sentence. A rule that can’t gets a weaker grade or is dropped.
- Every rule carries a word for how strong its evidence is, from Well established down to Refuted. How we grade evidence
- 104 of the 123 rules were checked against a source by a person, and 18 were settled by arithmetic or geometry. Software never marks a rule verified.
- Numbers we aren’t sure of are marked as estimates, and every one is listed on What we don’t know.
- Milpa gives no fertilizer amounts without a soil test. It tells you to get one.
What’s free
Everything. You can start planning without an account. Signed out, your garden stays on this device. A free account syncs it between your devices. Your data is never sold or used to advertise to you.
Languages
Milpa is in English and Spanish. The Spanish is a machine translation, checked by translating it back into English, and each Spanish screen says so. Where the two differ, the English is the version that counts. A fluent reader has not checked the Spanish yet.
To change the app’s language, open Account and pick one. On this site, a page with a Spanish version links to it at the top.
Take it with you
The rules Milpa runs on are one file you can download and reuse under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Your garden is yours too, and you can export it whenever you like.
Help · Privacy · How this is built · Where Milpa works · What’s new