Watering
Why is GRDN telling me to water when it rained yesterday?
Check which garden the job belongs to. Rain reaches open ground, but not a greenhouse, a cold frame, or anything under cover — GRDN counts only the rainfall that garden can actually catch, so a downpour outside does not water your polytunnel. If it really is an open bed and the advice still looks wrong, tell GRDN you watered it; the balance resets and settles.
Why does it want so much water?
Watering advice is per square metre of bed, and a genuinely dry bed can be tens of litres short. GRDN caps any single watering at the amount the soil can actually hold onto — pouring more just runs past the roots — and if the deficit is larger than that, it tells you to water again the next day rather than asking for something absurd in one go.
It says my bed is dry but the surface looks damp.
The surface is not the root zone. GRDN models water down to the rooting depth of the specific plant — 800 mm for a tomato, far less for a lettuce — and a shower that darkens the top centimetre changes very little further down. That said, your fingers outrank the model: if it is wet where the roots are, log a watering and move on.
Does it know about my soil?
Yes, as far as three presets go — sandy, loam or clay — which set how much water the soil can hold. Sandy soil holds much less and therefore needs watering more often and in smaller amounts. You set this when you create the garden.
Frost
When does a frost warning arrive?
The evening before, around 6pm, so there is still time to do something. A warning that arrives the morning after is a post-mortem, not a warning.
I got a frost warning but it did not frost. Or the reverse.
Frost warnings come from forecast overnight minimums, and forecasts are imperfect — particularly for the last degree or two, which is exactly the range that matters here. GRDN also adjusts for where each plant grows: containers are treated as colder than open ground because a root ball freezes from every side, glass as warmer, and a south-facing wall as slightly warmer. A plant given a spot of its own is judged there, not by the rest of its garden. A frost pocket at the bottom of your garden can still be several degrees colder than the forecast for the area. Treat a warning as "worth covering up", not as a guarantee, and treat its absence the same way.
Plants
The plant I want is not in the list.
Try its botanical name. GRDN knows far more plants by their Latin name than by every local name in every language, and its coverage in some languages is much thinner than in others — Polish and Italian especially, because that is what the underlying open datasets have. If GRDN finds nothing in your language it tries the botanical name and then other languages by itself, and tells you it did, rather than quietly showing you results in another one.
It says "no care guide yet". Can I still add it?
Yes, and it is worth doing. GRDN will keep your dates and records for it. Until it has a care guide, its watering and frost advice falls back on cautious general defaults, and the plant is marked as having no care guide so a default never passes for real horticultural data — the curated numbers in GRDN come from published sources.
Why does the harvest date keep moving?
Because the weather does. "60–85 days" on a packet assumes an average summer. GRDN counts the warmth your plants have actually accumulated, so a cold fortnight genuinely does push the harvest back. If the plant is visibly further along than GRDN thinks, tell it what stage the plant is at and the estimate re-anchors to what you saw.
Gardens
Why do I have to say which way my garden faces?
Because, on a slope or against a wall, it changes the answer. A south-facing site gathers more sun through the day, so it dries faster and needs more water; it also holds a little more warmth overnight, which shifts its frost risk. A north-facing bed twenty metres away is a different place. Below the equator this reverses, and GRDN reverses with it.
What is the difference between a garden and a plant?
A garden is a growing place — one bed, one greenhouse, one windowsill — with its own weather exposure, soil and environment. Plants live in gardens. Keeping them separate is the point: rain waters one and not the others, and a greenhouse is a different climate from the bed two metres outside it. A plant that grows somewhere other than the rest of its garden — a pot on the step — can be given its own spot, and GRDN works out its water and frost there.
Alerts
GRDN is not notifying me.
Check three things: that alerts are switched on in GRDN's own Settings, that notifications are allowed for GRDN in iOS Settings, and that a Focus mode is not suppressing them. GRDN only asks for notification permission when you turn alerts on yourself, so if you have never visited that setting, it has never asked.
Are frost alerts a paid feature?
No. Frost alerts are free, for everyone, permanently. An app that withholds a frost warning until you subscribe is one that lets plants die for money. GRDN Pro adds the routine reminders — watering, harvest, pruning — which are conveniences rather than rescues.
Pro and purchases
What do I get for free?
One garden, ten plants, and the entire care engine: real watering advice, real frost warnings, growth and harvest tracking, the whole plant catalogue, and frost alerts on your phone. A balcony with six pots never needs to pay anything.
What does GRDN Pro add?
Unlimited gardens, unlimited plants, and reminders for routine work on the morning it is due. GRDN Pro is an auto-renewing subscription: GRDN Pro Monthly at $2.99 / £2.99 a month, or GRDN Pro Yearly at $19.99 / £19.99 a year after a one-month free trial for new subscribers. Prices vary by country; the App Store shows yours before you confirm.
What happens if my subscription lapses?
You keep everything you have recorded, and you can keep viewing, watering and managing all of it. Only creating new gardens and plants beyond the free limits stops. We are not going to hide your garden from you because a card expired.
I bought Pro but a new phone does not know.
Open Settings inside GRDN and tap "Restore a previous purchase". Make sure you are signed in with the same Apple Account you bought it on.
Privacy
Does GRDN track me?
No. No analytics, no advertising identifier, no third-party SDKs, no account. Your gardens live in one file on your device and are not uploaded anywhere. The only thing that leaves the phone is a coordinate — rounded to about a kilometre — handed to Apple's weather service to ask what the weather is doing there. See the Privacy Policy.
Does it work offline?
Mostly. The plant catalogue is on the phone, so search works with no signal at all, and so does everything you have already recorded. Weather needs a connection to refresh — but GRDN keeps what it last fetched and carries on using it, because a day-old frost warning is still a frost warning and being on a train is not an error.
Still stuck?
Write to muddermister@gmail.com. Telling us what you were doing and which garden it was about saves a round trip.