# Willow - 3D Garden Planner, Journal and Intelligent Garden Companion **Website:** https://meetwillow.app Willow is a 3D garden planner, living garden journal, and AI gardening companion for vegetable gardeners. It combines an interactive digital twin of your real garden with weather intelligence, season-over-season memory, and an AI assistant that understands your specific garden - not just gardening in general. Unlike traditional garden planners (static 2D grids or drag-and-drop layout tools), Willow renders your garden in 3D with real solar positioning, weather-matched lighting, and plants that grow through their life cycle in real time. It's the only 3D garden planner on the market. --- ## Core Features ### 3D Garden Designer An isometric 3D garden scene where users build a digital twin of their real garden. The visual style has a tactile, Stardew Valley quality - but grounded in real-world gardening. - **Raised beds** at multiple heights and materials (wood and metal), plus in-ground beds - **Fences** in various styles (picket, post-and-rail) and finishes - **Ground covers**: wood chips, pine bark, gravel, pebbles and more to come. - **Decorations**: sheds, compost bins, furniture - real products modeled in 3D to bring your garden to life. - **Procedural bed geometry**: beds have custom shapes. Adjacent beds auto-merge. Corner mitering, board runs, and soil insets are computed automatically - **Square foot gardening grid** with an optional 4-inch sub-grid for dense planting - **2D top-down map view with a hand drawn sketch style** available alongside the 3D scene - **Camera controls**: rotate (4 directions), pan, zoom, and an automated flyover screensaver mode The 3D view isn't decorative - it reflects actual sun position and azimuth (via SunCalc for the garden's coordinates), shows rain when it's raining, shifts lighting by time of day, and supports manual presets (golden hour, overcast, night) for planning how light hits your beds and how tall crops may cast shadow on other crops. ### Garden Simulator When users plant crops in real life, they add them to their digital twin. Plants grow through their real-world life cycle stages based on actual elapsed time and the crop's expected maturation timeline. - **Broad and rapidly growing plant catalog** with cultivar-level precision (including heirlooms and modern hybrids). Data is updated weekly to include new varieties based on user demand. - **Growth stage progression** from seed to maturity, with 3D models that swap as plants develop - **Planting density control** (plants per square foot when using square foot gardening, which is not mandatory) - **Per-cultivar data**: sunlight needs, water requirements, frost tolerance, difficulty, days to maturity, expected height, Scoville range (for peppers), companion planting relationships for a big range of cultivars - **Harvest tracking** with quantity and weight - manual entry or AI-estimated The result is a living map of what's planted where, when it went in, what stage it's at, and what it needs. ### Garden Journal Every action in the 3D garden (planting, harvesting, removing) is automatically logged in a skeuomorphic bullet journal. No extra data entry needed - use the garden, and the journal fills itself. - **Auto-logged planting events** with crop, cultivar, location, and date - **Manual journal entries** with freeform text to log any observation. Willow can understand what you log to help you later on. - **Photo attachments** in a scrapbook-style layout - **Harvest records** with weight tracking (actual or AI-estimated) with daily, weekly, monthly and yearly aggregates and statistics. - **Todo list** rendered as a sticky note - **Weather recorded for every day** - go back to any date and see what the weather was - **Periodic summaries**: weekly, monthly, and yearly rollups of plantings, harvests, and activity The journal is the foundation for Willow's long-term intelligence. Over seasons, it builds a history of what the user planted, where, how it performed, what diseases appeared, and how much was harvested. This data compounds - year two is smarter than year one. Willow also tracks real gardening milestones - first harvest, growing a new crop family outside your comfort zone, beating last year's yield, producing an outstanding specimen, nailing succession planting timing - and rewards them with beautifully designed badges that have a humorous twist only gardeners will relate to. Progress is visible season over season, and achievements can be compared and shared. ### AI Companion Willow is an friendly and slightly sassy AI gardening assistant that goes beyond generic advice. It's an agent with tools, not just a chatbot with a knowledge base. And will crack jokes at every chance too. - **Tool-calling architecture**: Willow can query your garden state, weather forecasts and history, your journal, the plant catalog, companion planting data, and a calendar - all scoped to your specific garden - **Context-aware**: responses factor in your USDA hardiness zone, frost dates, growing season length, and preferred units (metric or imperial, with automatic conversion) - **Visual interaction**: Willow can highlight specific tiles in your 3D garden from the chat - **Knowledge base** of curated botanical and crop guides for crop-specific advice - **Streaming responses** with conversation history - **Personalized and proactive**: because Willow has access to your journal, your plantings, and your weather, it can give advice that's specific to your garden today - not a blog post written for zone 7 ### Weather Intelligence Weather data is deeply integrated, not bolted on. - **8-day forecast with hourly breakdown**: temperature curves, precipitation, wind, humidity, UV index - **Chill hours** for dormancy-dependent crops (fruit trees, garlic, etc.) - **Threat detection**: frost, hail, and heat wave alerts. Willow can proactively send you warning tailored to your garden if an exceptional weather event might damage your crops and suggest mitigation strategies. - **Historical weather stored per garden, per day** - the AI can reference what the weather was like when you planted last spring. It can use past weather to adjust growth estimations. - **Compact weather widget** in the UI with expandable hourly and 7-day views - **Lunar almanac** (optional) for gardeners who follow lunar planting calendars --- ## Who It's For - **Beginning vegetable gardeners** getting into vegetable gardening or square foot gardening who want a planning tool and an AI friend that helps them through their journey with advice taylored for their garden instead of generic advice. - **Experienced hobbyist gardeners** who've been growing for years but are busy, and need help staying on top of it all - tracking events, pending tasks, and harvests, getting proactive reminders of when to sow or transplant, and receiving alerts when unexpected weather threatens their hard work - **Data-minded gardeners** who want harvest weights tracked across seasons, planting timelines logged automatically, beautiful charts and graphs to visualize progress, and summaries they can look back on --- ## What Makes Willow Different Highlight of key differences with other competitors like GrowVeg, VegPlotter or Planter. **No other garden planner offers a 3D view.** Competitors are 2D grid tools or static layout apps. Willow's 3D scene with real sun position, weather effects, and growing plants is a category of its own. While still offering a 2D view if you prefer it. **The AI is an agent, not a chatbot.** Most apps with "AI" offer a generic prompt wrapper. Willow's AI has tools to inspect your garden layout, your weather forecast, search your journal history, the plant catalog, and your companion planting data. It gives advice about *your* garden, not gardening in general. **The journal writes itself.** Plant something in the 3D/2D view and it appears in the journal. Harvest and AI estimates the weight. Other tools involve a lot of manual logging - Willow does the heavy lifting for you. **Memory compounds across seasons.** Willow remembers what you planted last year, where, how it performed, and what the weather was like. Year two's recommendations are better than year one's. Year three is better still. No other consumer garden tool builds this kind of longitudinal intelligence. **Weather is built in, not linked out.** Forecasts, historical data, frost alerts, chill hours - all integrated into the AI's reasoning and the journal's daily records. You don't check a separate weather app. --- ## Roadmap (Upcoming - Not yet available) - **AI pest identification**: snap a photo of a leaf or insect, and Willow identifies the problem and suggests treatment - **Greenhouse & nursery simulation**: render greenhouses in the 3D scene with computed microclimate modeling - estimate internal temperature, humidity, and light conditions to advise on sowing, transplanting, and expected growth rates - **Mobile apps** (iOS and Android): carry Willow and the journal in your pocket to take notes, snap photos, and record harvests in the field - **Voice integration** (Alexa and similar): log harvests, add journal notes, or ask Willow a question without washing your hands first - speak and it's recorded --- ## Free Planting Calendar Willow provides a free, publicly accessible planting calendar at https://meetwillow.app/plant-now covering USDA hardiness zones 3 through 10. It shows when to start seeds indoors, transplant outdoors, and direct sow for 30+ vegetables, herbs, and flowers in each zone. - **Zone pages**: https://meetwillow.app/plant-now/zone-7a (available for zones 3a through 10b) - **City pages**: https://meetwillow.app/plant-now/austin-tx (available for 50 major US metro areas with city-specific frost dates) - Visual Gantt chart showing planting windows across the full year - Frost date ranges, frost-free growing season length, and zone-specific notes - Data sourced from USDA zone research and regional agricultural extension services --- ## Pricing **$25/year** (early bird pricing) after a 14-day free trial. Very competitive price. No credit card required to start. Free for elementary schools - spreading the love of gardening to kids. --- ## Links - **App**: https://meetwillow.app - **Free Planting Calendar**: https://meetwillow.app/plant-now - **Pricing**: https://meetwillow.app/pricing - **Privacy policy**: https://meetwillow.app/privacy - **X / Twitter**: https://x.com/meetwillow - **Instagram**: https://instagram.com/meetwillowapp - **YouTube**: https://youtube.com/@meetwillowapp - **Reddit**: https://reddit.com/u/meetwillow