GardenKnowm

GardenKnowm is a local-first homestead management app for gardeners, beekeepers, poultry keepers, and small-scale livestock owners. Everything you record — plants, hives, flocks, animals, soil tests, journal entries, photos — stays in a database on your own device. No account to create, no cloud backend, no subscription.

WHY LOCAL-FIRST
Most homestead apps are subscription clouds that lock your data behind their servers. GardenKnowm is the opposite: a standard SQLite database on your own device, exportable any time. No server to breach, no account to hack, nothing to keep paying for.

WHAT YOU CAN TRACK
• Plants — annual planning with frost-relative scheduling, spring and fall planting windows, variety-level tracking, year-over-year performance ratings, photo-based plant ID
• Bees — multi-hive tracking, structured inspections, queen lineage, honey harvests with brix/moisture/color, treatment history
• Poultry — per-flock or per-bird egg logging, bulk-add for hatchery batches, adaptive feed reminders
• Livestock — goats, sheep, pigs, cattle, rabbits, and more, with kind-specific vocabulary and USDA-aware tag fields
• Animal health & pedigree — weight-history charts, medication and treatment logs with withdrawal tracking, gestation and incubation due-date countdowns, and pedigree family trees for livestock and poultry
• Compost — per-method reminder cadence, hot-pile temperature tracking
• Soil tests — lab-agnostic quick or advanced mode, drives fertilizer recommendations

USING WHAT YOU GROW
• 199 sourced ways to keep and use a harvest — canning, pickling, fermenting, freezing, drying, jams — across 238 crops plus honey, beeswax, and eggs. From the National Center for Home Food Preservation (USDA-funded) and university extension
• Per-100g nutrition for 178+ crops from USDA SR Legacy, on the plant screen
• Outside the US, the app says plainly that these methods are US-sourced and links your own national food authority where there is one

SMART GUIDANCE, REAL AGRONOMY
• Irrigation advisor factoring in evapotranspiration, soil type, and mulch depth — not just "more or less water," but specific frequency and duration
• Heat, freeze, and frost alerts tied to your local forecast, with push notifications for time-critical events
• Pest alerts cross-referencing iNaturalist observations against the crops you're growing
• Yard biodiversity scoring that folds in both what you've planted and what wildlife iNaturalist users have observed nearby
• Recommendations cite real sources — NC State Extension, FAO-56 Penman-Monteith ET₀, USDA hardiness zones, NCDA&CS soil-test frameworks, NCHFP

YOUR DATA, YOUR CHOICE
Export your full database to a JSON backup any time, or sync directly between your own devices over your local network — no cloud in the middle. Optional integrations (AI assistant, weather stations, plant identification) use API keys you provide and pay for directly; if you don't add a key, the feature is simply invisible.

FREE, WITH AN HONEST UPGRADE
The free version includes every core feature and shows ads. GardenKnowm Pro is a one-time purchase — no subscription, ever — that removes ads and usage tracking entirely, and unlocks a finance ledger (sales and expenses, tagged by area, with PDF reports), breeding-stock comparison, genetics analysis, and PDF inspection reports.

WHAT IT'S NOT
GardenKnowm isn't a commercial farm platform — no inventory management or labor-force scheduling, though the finance ledger does cover your own sales and expenses. It isn't a social network, and isn't a plant-identification camera app on its own (it integrates with Pl@ntNet and iNaturalist for that). It's built for home gardeners and homesteaders alike — whether you're growing your first tomato bed or already running a working homestead with bees, poultry, and livestock.