What Broadfork can do

Beds take any size and any angle, and no bed can land on another. Each plant is drawn at the size it has grown to, from the published size of the crop, so the map shows the plant and not the gap between plants, and a perennial is drawn larger each year it stands. The paths, lawn and gravel between the beds are painted too, so the map looks like the ground you walk.

Step a week at a time, type a date, or play the season through, and the screen says which day it is showing. It can do this because it keeps when each planting went in and came out, so any day can be drawn from your own record.

The map moves to what you named and selects it, so its card opens beside the map.

Each stop of the tour points at the real control and says what it is and how to work it. Skip it any time, and take it again from Help.

There are guides for planting, the ground, plans, beds, the grow list, tasks and your frost dates. Each runs on the sample garden, one step at a time, and points at the real control. Where a job starts on an empty screen, Walk me through it opens its guide, until you have done it once.

A raised bed is drawn with its boards, blocks or straw and the soil inside. A bed keeps the date it was built and a history of its size, so a bed you widened this spring still shows last year at last year's size.

A trellis has a style, a material and a height, along a side or down the middle. Netting, frost cloth, and low and high tunnels are drawn the same way, and a tunnel's covers can change on a day and keep their history. The frost and heat notes know what is covering a crop.

Make, rename and recolor a group. The Timeline and the beds report sort by the same groups, so a big garden reads in the parts you think of it in.

Pick Meadow, Canopy, Harvest or Frost in Settings, or tick Change with the seasons and the colors follow the year: Meadow for spring, Canopy for summer, Harvest for fall and Frost for winter. With your local weather data, a season's colors can come a little early, never late. High contrast keeps each scheme's color.

Name a crop and plant it. Add the variety now, later or never. A crop or variety that is not in the catalog is kept and offered from then on, and the app asks the few things it needs to know about it as you make it.

Click squares, drag to fill, or sweep a whole area. A shadow shows what a click would plant before you click, and the banner counts plants as you go and says how many the bed holds.

On Seed Starts, pick a crop and its When to sow chart opens under the form. Drag the line for the day you started, or the one for the day you mean to set it out once it has a date. When the seedlings go out, plant them into a bed from the start's own line in the list, and History keeps each year's starts after they leave the active list.

The two are kept apart on purpose. You set the spacing; the published size of the crop sets how big it is drawn. Plants that will crowd each other are pointed out, and never refused.

Interplant on ground a crop already holds. Both keep their own dates and their own record.

Each pairing carries its source and a rating: backed by a trial, traditional or disputed. A note appears beside the crop you are placing, and the app says when each companion goes in.

Plant again opens the form dated one round later. If a crop meant to follow another can never meet it in time, the app says so.

For a crop sown in waves, each round keeps its own dates and picks.

Log a self-sown plant as the way a planting arrived, name a volunteer once you know what it is, or leave ground to reseed. Runners and cuttings are their own act, with windows from the research for when to take them.

Broadcast a cover crop or a mix over a bed's squares. The bed reads as covered, with no harvest to log, and the cover ends on its kill date, the day you cut it or turn it under. Oats, winter wheat, barley, cereal rye and buckwheat can be grown for grain instead: tick Grown for grain and the planting takes picks and comes out of the ground like any other crop. Its harvest dates start empty, because the research behind them is about growing these as covers.

Each crop has a page: what the app knows about it, and what it does not. Days to maturity are as the packet prints them; where a variety has none, the app uses an average for the crop or its family and says which.

A perennial gets its expected harvest window each year it stands, and a note when a stand is reaching the end of its life.

Your frost dates and summer temperatures are looked up from your ZIP code. Outside the US, or if you know your own dates better, type them in Settings and yours are used instead.

The window is drawn on the Timeline as soon as a planting is in, and it is always an estimate, said as one. Once you log picks, your real window is drawn over it.

Some crops bolt in the heat and some fade as the days shorten. The app knows which, and the bar shows where your season ends that crop.

The cool and warm of your season are shaded behind the bars, the part still ahead is drawn faint, and picks are drawn as ticks. Hover any piece of a bar and it says what that piece means for that plant.

Where pruning decides whether there is a second crop, the choice is yours to set.

A bed keeps when each planting went in and came out, its picks and its notes, beside the map. Next year starts from this record instead of from memory.

The units fit the crop: garlic is counted in bulbs, with scapes logged as their own. Every pick can be edited later.

Your actual harvest sits beside the expected one, so a crop that came in early, late or light is plain to see when you plan the next one.

A logged stage moves the planting's bar and says what moved it. A pest seen in one bed asks the nearby plantings with no cover whether they want netting.

Ratings are kept per planting and per year, so the good years and the bad ones are on the record.

A frost note is raised ahead of time, against your own frost dates, while there is still something to do about it.

The app says when a bed comes free, which plant families it has held, and how long before one should go back in.

A note the app cannot source is not raised. This is the reason the tool can be trusted with a decision: nothing in it is a guess dressed as advice.

Mute one note, or one bed out of a garden-wide one, and turn it back on when you like. A mute ends with the crop it was about.

The Tasks page sorts by day, by bed or by task. The chores come from what is in the ground and what you have logged: the straw before winter, the covers, the netting. Add a task of your own, and a note you log can put the next one on the list.

Garlic's year: order the seed, plant after your first frost, straw it, and rake the straw back in spring. Straw over the strawberries for winter and off again in spring. Tomatoes and peppers hardened off before they go out, tomatoes topped a month before frost, the tomatoes and onions fed again, and seed potatoes cut so the cuts heal. These come up only for the crops you grow or have planned.

Bug netting over cucumbers, squash and melons by mid-May and off when they bloom, so the bees can reach the flowers, and over the cabbage family from planting to harvest. Bird netting over fruit a week before its picking starts, or as soon as you log the fruit coloring.

Read them on the Guides page, or in the app: the Tasks page lists them, and a task with a guide opens it at the part it is about.

On Reports, for the crops you grow or all of them: the first and last day to sow or set out, and the stretch the summer heat takes from a cool-season crop. Press a crop to find the beds it fits.

The plan uses the same map and the same placing as the garden itself, so a plan is planting done early rather than a separate sketch.

Push a plan to the garden whole or in part, merge two, and undo any of it.

A template has no bed and no year, so it can start a plan anywhere: plant its layout, or just add its crops and place them yourself. On a bed of another size, Fit to this bed lays the plantings out again for the room that bed has. Without it, only what fits as saved is placed.

What grew in a bed before sits beside the plan, so rotation is in front of you while you plan, not in a notebook somewhere else. It also suggests crops from your inventory to rotate to, and Settings picks a three- or four-year rotation.

Pick a year and list the crops. A task comes up when it is time to start each one's seed and on the day you set to order, and you tick each line off as it is planned. Press + Planting beside a crop, on the grow list or on Plants, and the Map opens on that year for you to click the beds it goes in, with its date left for you to set.

The beds report has a small timeline for each bed that plays its year.

A crop you made has one page with its facts and its seeds.

Two spellings of one pest can be merged.

One click takes you from a line in a report to the ground it is about.

Your garden lives in your browser on your own machine.

A backup restores on any computer, and shows when it was saved before it does.

Undo works across the app, with Redo and a list of your last twenty actions.

Nothing fails quietly and leaves you thinking it worked.

It installs as its own window on a computer. A view for a phone held upright is on the roadmap.

A report sends your garden file only if you tick the box.