Frequently Asked Questions

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Golden Almanac is a planting calendar and garden manager built specifically for California. Instead of a single nationwide zone map, it works from six California growing regions — SoCal Coast, SoCal Inland, Low Desert, Central Valley, NorCal Coast / Bay, and Mountains — so your planting windows reflect where you actually garden, not a national average.

It's designed for home gardeners growing in containers and raised beds.

Golden Almanac runs in your web browser at app.mygoldenalmanac.com — no download, no signup required. Open it, choose your region, and you're growing.

You can also add it to your phone's home screen so it opens like any other app (the app will offer this itself once you've added your first crop):

• iPhone/iPad: Open app.mygoldenalmanac.com in Safari, tap the Share button, then "Add to Home Screen."
• Android: Open app.mygoldenalmanac.com in Chrome, tap the menu (⋮), then "Add to Home screen."

Once approved, Golden Almanac is also available on the App Store.

No. The app works the moment you open it — your garden, tasks, and journal are saved automatically to a private account created for you behind the scenes.

Adding your email (Settings → link your garden) is optional, and does one thing: it lets you sign in on another device and find the same garden waiting. Sign-in is a 6-digit code sent to your email — no password to invent or forget.

Pick the one that matches your conditions, not just your city limits:

• SoCal Coast — the San Diego–LA coastal strip; marine layer, mild summers, rare frost
• SoCal Inland — inland valleys and foothills; hotter summers, occasional frost
• Low Desert — Coachella and Imperial valleys; extreme summer heat, mild winters, a growing season that runs opposite most of the country
• Central Valley — Sacramento to Bakersfield; hot dry summers, cool foggy winters, long season
• NorCal Coast / Bay — SF Bay and the north coast; cool summers, fog, long mild shoulder seasons
• Mountains — Sierra and high elevations; short season, real winters, late spring frost
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If you're near a boundary, the honest answer is that the smaller-window region is the safer starting point — you can always plant early, but you can't un-lose a crop to a late frost. You can change your region any time with the ⇄ Switch region button at the top of the app.

Partly, and we'd rather be straight about which part. Enter any US ZIP code and the weather and your USDA hardiness zone will be accurate wherever you are — but the planting windows are built for California's six regions, so outside the state, treat them as a rough guide. (The app will tell you exactly that if your ZIP is out of state.) If you garden elsewhere, you can [join the waitlist / sign up for updates] and we'll tell you when your state is supported.

The core of the app is free, permanently:

• The full planting calendar for all 154 crops, in all six regions — plus the ability to add your own crops we haven't thought of
• A task list with one-tap suggestions built from what you're growing, location tags ("Raised bed 1"), due dates, and repeating chores
• 11 beginner guides (soil, watering, pruning, pH, drip irrigation…) and a 72-term glossary
• Text-based harvest journaling, including multi-crop entries and location tags
• Hyper-local weather and your USDA zone from your ZIP code
• CSV export of your harvest records

Golden Almanac Premium adds the power tools:

• The Botanist — ask a gardening expert anything, in plain language. It knows your region, the current month, and every crop in your garden, and you can attach a photo of a struggling plant for a diagnosis in seconds.
• Packet Reader — snap a photo of any seed packet and the almanac types it into your Seed Bank for you: crop, variety, brand, quantity, days to maturity.
• Photo journaling — attach photos to your harvest entries.
• Variety picks — 654 named varieties across 94 crops, matched to your region, so you're choosing between proven cultivars instead of just "tomato."
• Task reminders — set a day and time on any task and your phone pings you; repeating reminders included.

$5.99/month or $49.99/year (about $4.17/month — 30% off). Premium is purchased in the iPhone app through the App Store; one subscription covers your account everywhere you're signed in. There's no separate web checkout yet.

Premium is billed by Apple, so cancellation lives in your Apple Account: iPhone Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Golden Almanac → Cancel. You keep Premium through the end of the period you've paid for, and everything you made with it stays visible afterward. New phone or reinstalled the app? Settings → Restore purchases pulls your subscription back from the App Store.

No. The calendar, all 154 crops, tasks, seed bank, guides, glossary, and text journaling stay free. And if you ever let Premium lapse, everything you created with it — photos, variety picks, reminders — stays visible and editable; you just can't add new ones.

In the iPhone app, Premium members can set a reminder time on any task and the phone pings at that moment — repeating on schedule for recurring chores. There's also a free optional daily check-in reminder (Settings) that nudges you once a day to see what needs planting, watering, or harvesting. In the browser version, tasks show due chips and an overdue flag, but browsers can't ring your phone.

Open the Calendar tab and find your crop (search or filter by type). Each crop card shows its year at a glance for your region: blue months for starting seeds indoors, green for planting out, orange for harvest. Tap a card open for depth — sun needs, container size, time to harvest, and a growing tip.

Your seed-packet inventory, one tab over from the journal. Add the packets you own — crop, variety, brand, quantity, days to maturity — and next time you're standing in the seed aisle wondering whether you already have Cherokee Purple, the answer is a search away. Adding packets by hand is free; Premium adds the Packet Reader, which fills in the details from a photo of the packet.

A growing assistant you can ask questions in plain language — why your leaves are yellowing, whether it's too late to plant beans, what to do about aphids. You can attach a photo to a question. It knows your region, month, and what's in your garden, and it sticks to gardening — it will politely decline to write your emails. It's a Premium feature, with a generous fair-use allowance (300 questions and packet scans a month — about ten a day).

My Garden is your starred shortlist of what you're actually growing. It lives right on the Calendar tab — tap ★ My Garden to filter down to just your plants. Everything you star feeds your task suggestions, and your journal records the dates and details as the season unfolds.

On the Calendar tab, tap the + on any crop card. It joins ★ My Garden and starts driving your task suggestions. Growing something we don't list? Tap ＋ Add your own crop at the bottom of the calendar — custom crops go straight into My Garden and get the same months-to-plant treatment.

Free accounts can log any crop by name. Premium accounts get Varieties for My Garden, which narrows 654 varieties down to the ones that actually perform in your region — so you're not gambling on a cultivar bred for Vermont.

Recording what you actually picked, and when. Over a couple of seasons this becomes the most useful thing in the app — it's a record of what works in your garden, which no calendar can tell you in advance. You can log several crops in one entry (transplant day for a whole bed), tag where it happened, and note the variety.

Photo journaling is a Premium feature. Text entries are free.

Yes. On the Journal tab, tap ⬇ Export CSV any time — date, crop, variety, location, and notes. (Photos aren't included in the export.) Your records are yours.

It's built to give California-specific answers, and it's the feature we're most careful about. But it is an AI assistant, and it can be wrong. Treat its answers as a knowledgeable starting point rather than a final verdict — especially for anything involving pesticides, edibility, or plant identification. For those, verify with your county's UC Master Gardener program.

Your questions (and any photo you attach) are sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate the answer, and Anthropic does not train models on them. We don't store your conversations on our servers — they live on your device. Full detail is in our [Privacy Policy — link to the policy page].

Tap ⇄ Switch region at the top of the app. Your calendar updates immediately.

Your garden data is yours. We don't sell your personal information, there are no ads and no trackers, and your ZIP code never leaves your device — it's only used locally to look up weather and your USDA zone. Photos are re-encoded before saving, which strips location metadata. 

Your garden data is yours. We don't sell your personal information, there are no ads and no trackers, and your ZIP code never leaves your device — it's only used locally to look up weather and your USDA zone. Photos are re-encoded before saving, which strips location metadata. Settings (⚙, top right) → Delete account. After you confirm, deletion is immediate and permanent — your account, garden, journal entries, and photos are removed from our servers right away, not held in a recovery window. (Anonymous, aggregated statistics that can't be traced back to you may persist, as described in the Privacy Policy.)