What a garden planner usually is, and what this one is instead
The category is a solved product with a dozen good versions. This one is built on the opposite premise, and that isn't a feature you could bolt onto the others.
The category already works
There’s a mature market of garden-planning apps, and most of them are good at what they do. They draw a bed to scale, snap plants onto a spacing grid, read your frost dates off a nearby weather station, and hand you a planting calendar with reminders. If that’s what you want, several of them will serve you well, and some are cheaper and have bigger plant libraries than this one.
This planner isn’t trying to win that contest on its own terms. It’s built on a different premise, and the difference runs deeper than any single feature. You can’t bolt it onto one of the others, because it’s a decision about what a recommendation is even allowed to be.
Every suggestion has to show its work
In most planners, a recommendation is an assertion. “Plant these together.” “Start indoors six weeks before your last frost.” “These are good companions.” The advice might be perfectly sound, but you’re asked to trust it because it’s on the screen, and there’s no way to ask why, or how sure, or who says so.
Here, every rule the engine fires has to name the reason it works in one sentence, carry an evidence grade, and cite its sources. If it can’t, it gets downgraded until it can, or dropped. When this planner tells you not to do something, the reason is right there, gradable and checkable:
Don't follow a Verticillium host with raspberries, strawberries or stone fruit
If you skip this, you lose real yield. The planner warns you.
How it works: Verticillium dahliae persists in soil as microsclerotia and infects a wide host range spanning nightshades and rose family. There is no in-ground cure once a susceptible perennial is planted, so it can wilt and die from inoculum an earlier host left behind. Because the reservoir family may differ from the victim's, the same-family rotation intervals miss it.
Evidence: checked against 3 sources in the research-based literature.
Verticillium wilt is caused by two common soilborne fungi (Verticillium dahliae and Verticillium albo-atrum) that have a wide host range
www.umass.edu
Brambles - DiseasesUMass Extension, New England Small Fruit Management Guide
Verticillium attacks a wide range of plants, including potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and strawberries. It overwinters in the soil and on plant debris. Do not plant [raspberries following these crops].
Verticillium Wilt of Tomato and Eggplant NC State Extension
Verticillium Wilt of Tomato and Eggplant
Remedy
Site the perennial on ground with no recent nightshades, or choose one that is not Verticillium-susceptible. Extension advises growing a non-host (corn or a small grain) for at least two years first, without claiming that clears the soil. Once the perennial is planted there is no in-ground cure.
That card is the advice. The whole corpus, all 136 rules, is built to that standard, and a claim that can’t meet it doesn’t get to become a recommendation.
What that premise forces everywhere else
Once “show your work” is the rule, a lot of the category’s standard furniture can’t be built to that standard, and this planner goes without it on purpose:
No companion-planting chart. The grid of good and bad neighbors can’t give a reason for each cell, so almost none of it survives the test. The long version is its own page; the short version is that 35 of the individual claims are kept as graded records instead, each with our answer.
No made-up numbers. When a recommendation would need a soil pH or a fertilizer figure the corpus doesn’t have, the planner says “get a soil test.” It doesn’t guess. A number we aren’t sure of is marked as an estimate.
Odds for your frost date. Your frost date is really a probability, so this planner shows you the band (half the years frosted by this date, one year in ten as late as that one) in place of one confident day. Why a hardiness zone can’t give you a frost date is its own explainer.
No AI making things up. There’s no chatbot inventing planting advice here. An answer with no reason and no source is exactly the thing this corpus exists to refuse, and a fluent guess is still a guess.
Your garden is yours, including when you leave
One more difference, with nothing to do with the corpus and everything to do with trust: your data never becomes a hostage. Your whole season log exports as a plain text file you can read, keep, and paste back in. No account is needed to plan, and nothing you entered is locked behind a subscription that stops working the day you cancel. The planner is free for planning, and no paid tier will ever charge for access to your own records.
What it costs you
The premise has a price. This planner has a smaller plant library than the big commercial tools: 129 species, on purpose, because a graded record for each one is slower to build than a shallow entry, and the corpus would rather be short and right than long and padded. It has no companion chart, which some people really want. It won’t hand you a confident single date when the truth is a range. And it grows more slowly, because a human has to read a source before a claim can be called verified.
If you want the biggest library and the most features for the least money, one of the others is probably your tool. If you want a planner that can always tell you why it said what it said, and show you exactly how sure it is, this one is built to do that, and they aren’t.