Currently in development — join the waitlist

Most garden apps stop
where serious gardeners start.

Vernal is a planning tool for gardeners who track beds by name, seeds by variety, and harvests by weight. Built for the grower who's outgrown everything else.

No spam. Notified when Vernal opens for early access. Nothing else.

In active development — follow the build
Open core — free tier that isn't hobbled
Web-based — runs in your browser, no install
AGPL-3.0 — open source from day one

What Vernal is

A planning tool that takes your garden as seriously as you do.

Vernal handles the full cycle. From laying out your beds and placing plants, through tracking what you sowed and when, to logging what you actually harvested at the end of the season. It connects those pieces so the data you collect this year is useful next year.

The core app is free and open source. Unlimited gardens, full layout tools, complete seed catalogue, planting guide with frost date integration, and harvest tracking with season-over-season comparison. No trial period, no feature cap designed to push you to subscribe.

Garden canvas
Design your beds in grid or freeform; whichever matches how you think. Place plants by variety, get companion planting warnings, and layer past seasons on top of each other to see what changed.
Seed catalogue
Your seeds organized at the variety level, with sowing history attached. Community database backed by Cambium. Growth stage illustrations for 30+ vegetables and herbs at launch, with community contributions over time.
Planting guide
Calendar, timeline, or list. You choose how to see it. Frost dates and spacing handled automatically. Mark sowings done and the data flows through to your harvest log without any double entry.
Harvest log
Log what you pull, when you pull it, at whatever unit makes sense for that plant — weight, count, bunches. Yields by bed, by variety, by season. Enough data to actually know what worked.

Open source

The core app is free.
That's a promise, not a pitch.

Vernal is open core. The application is AGPL-3.0 licensed and the code is public on GitHub from day one. The free tier includes everything most gardeners need: unlimited gardens, the full canvas, your complete seed catalogue, planting guide, growth visualization, and harvest tracking with season history.

Paid features exist: cloud sync, weather station integration, advanced analytics, photo journaling, and they're clearly labeled. But the free tier isn't designed around a ceiling. It's designed to be complete.

View on GitHub
Free — always
Unlimited gardens and beds
Full canvas — grid and freeform
Complete seed catalogue
Planting guide with frost dates
Growth visualization
Harvest log and season history
Cambium community database
CSV export, printable layout

Development journal

Built in public,
from the beginning.

Every decision about how Vernal gets built, the tools chosen, the things that got rebuilt, the tradeoffs that weren't obvious until they were, will be written up here. The first post goes up when development starts. Subscribe and you'll get it.

Follow the build
New posts to your inbox. No cadence commitments. Posts ship when they're done.
Coming soon
Why garden apps keep failing serious gardeners — and what Vernal is trying to do differently
The problem isn't that the apps are bad. It's that they were designed for a different gardener.
First post — development start
Coming soon
Building a garden canvas from scratch. Why I chose Konva.js and what it cost me
The canvas is the hardest part of the app. Here's how the architecture decisions got made.
Canvas series — part 1
Coming soon
Cambium: rebuilding the seed database OpenFarm left behind
OpenFarm shut down in April 2025. Its data is still good. Here's what we're doing with it.
Data series — part 1