Welcome to GardenBuddy: Gardening, Building, and Figuring It Out

Hi everyone — all zero of you.

Welcome to the GardenBuddy Blog. My plan here is to document my gardening adventures, share practical tips and lessons learned, and hopefully help other people have a little more success in their own gardens. These posts will also be available in the GardenBuddy app, but it felt right to start here with a proper introduction.

About Me

My name is Andree. It is pronounced “Andre,” but thanks to an unfortunate typo on my birth certificate, I ended up with the extra “e,” and it just kind of stuck.

Technically, my first gardening-related experience goes back to sixth grade, when I did a science fair project comparing the effects of urine versus water on plant development. Yes, it was gross. Yes, the plant suffered. And yes, my science teacher apparently caught some heat for approving that one. By the time I had her again in eighth grade, my science fair participation came with a very public reminder that I would be closely supervised. A humbling experience, but probably fair.

Realistically, though, I started gardening about two years ago.

By trade, I am a software developer, so I naturally tend to think in systems, processes, and structure. It turns out that mindset is actually pretty useful in gardening. There are patterns to learn, variables to manage, and plenty of opportunities to improve your results by being observant and consistent. Gardening also has a more creative side, though, and that is where I tend to feel a little less natural.

What This Blog Will Cover

This probably will not be the place to find advice on designing beautiful flower beds or building the perfect ornamental landscape. That is not really my lane.

What you will find here is a practical focus on growing food, especially vegetables and berries. My goal is to write about the parts of gardening that help people actually get results: seed starting, direct sowing, succession sowing, harvesting, bed maintenance, fertilizing, soil improvement, and the many mistakes that happen in between.

I live in North Texas, in USDA Zone 8b, so a lot of my experience will naturally come from gardening in that climate. I am less interested in fruit trees, both because our winters can be just rough enough to make them more trouble than I want to take on, and because they are a much longer-term commitment than I am aiming for right now.

My main focus is vegetable gardening. Not full homesteading. Not total self-sufficiency. Just trying to grow good food, learn what works, and offset a little of the grocery bill in the process.

Part of that motivation is practical. Produce is expensive, and sometimes the expensive version still is not very good. Last summer I bought several watermelons from a local family farm. Some were excellent. Some were bland enough to make me think I would rather spend that money trying to grow my own. Even if I fail a few times, at least it is a more interesting way to lose money.

Thankfully, gardening is also a genuinely fun hobby, which helps.

Why I Built GardenBuddy

I created GardenBuddy because once I started gardening, I had a constant stream of questions. Honestly, I still do. That is just how my brain works.

I tried a number of gardening apps along the way, and most of them felt underwhelming for what they charged. The one I actually paid for had some useful features, but it still did not do several of the things I wanted it to do. Eventually, instead of staying frustrated, I decided to build my own.

That is how GardenBuddy started.

At first, development moved faster than I expected, especially considering that mobile development is not my day job. I was able to reach feature parity on the things I cared about pretty quickly. Then life happened. My first child was born in June of last year, and development stopped abruptly. Around the same time, I also lost a bit of momentum with both app development and gardening in general, helped in no small part by learning that strawberries are not especially rewarding in their first year.

Recently, though, improvements in LLMs and agentic coding tools have made it much easier for me to experiment inside the app. I can test ideas quickly, throw things away when they don’t work, and move on without feeling like I wasted a huge amount of effort. The end result may not be dramatically faster development, but it is a much better creative process.

GardenBuddy exists because I wanted a gardening app that matched the way I think: practical, organized, flexible, and built around the real questions that come up when you are trying to grow something successfully.

What Comes Next

My guess is that the next post will be about perennial bed maintenance. My strawberry patch has last year’s undergrowth thanks to some lazy end-of-season cleanup last year, so that feels like a timely place to start.

I may also write about the new beds I am building for this season and turn it into a broader garden prep post. Here in Zone 8b, we are getting close to the last frost date, which means the season is about to speed up. Other gardeners farther north are still waiting a bit longer unless they have the luxury of hoop houses or greenhouses.

Either way, I expect this blog to follow the gardening season as it unfolds: what I am planting, what is working, what is not, and what I am learning along the way.

Thanks for Reading

Thanks for stopping by. I mean that sincerely.

Time is valuable, and I appreciate you spending some of yours here. My hope is that this blog becomes useful to you, whether you are building your first garden, trying to improve an existing one, or just curious to follow along as I figure things out.

If nothing else, maybe I can at least save you from running your own sixth-grade plant experiment.