Samizdat Publications / Canton, Ohio

GardenSync

A square-foot bed planner for a community kitchen garden. 77 plants with full companion and antagonist data, cross-indexed against Canton's Zone 6a frost dates — seven container types, a grow schedule built from what you actually planted, harvest tracking, volunteer assignment, and an AI assistant that can do the planting for you. No accounts, no server, no build step.

Plants

Container types

Demo gardens

Workspaces

JS modules

Open the planner → Source

There is a sibling edition of this garden — A Quiet Almanac, the same agronomy rebuilt calm, on paper and ink (repo).

The GardenSync bed planner in emerald on black: five raised beds full of plants on a dark grid, with the plant library on the left and bed details on the right. — The planner — emerald on black, Anton display typeFig.01

Sec.01

Six workspaces

One garden

Bed Planner

The canvas. Click a plant, click a square, and it lands on a 20px grid with spacing checked and companion threads drawn to its neighbours.

Grow Schedule

Every crop you placed, laid out across the year — start indoors, transplant, direct sow, harvest — calibrated to Canton's 193-day season.

Harvest

Pounds picked, per bed, per plant, with a flag for what went out to the community and a season goal bar that fills as the year runs.

Volunteers

A crew rather than a staff roster: people, availability, bed assignments, and a weekly task list that generates itself from them.

Climate Data

Live conditions and a 7-day forecast from Open-Meteo, plus Canton's rainfall and temperature curves drawn on canvas from the climate record.

Visualize

An optional mockup step — hand it a Gemini key and it renders what the beds you planned might actually look like standing in the ground.

The bed planner with the Community Classic garden loaded: four raised beds holding 95 plants, companion threads drawn between compatible neighbours, a plant library panel on the left and bed details on the right. — Bed planner — Community Classic, 95 plants across four bedsFig.02

Sec.02

Planning a bed

Companion-aware

01 / Companion planting

Friends drawn, quarrels flagged

Every plant carries its companions and its antagonists. Place one and the threads draw themselves — dashed green between plants that help each other, red where two crops will fight.

Here tomatoes sit with basil and marigold, and carrots with onions: the classic pairings, made visible rather than remembered.

A raised bed zoomed in, showing tomatoes, peppers, basil, marigolds, carrots and onions with dashed green companion threads drawn between compatible neighbours. — Companion threads at 210% zoomFig.03

02 / The plant library

77 plants, searchable by what you need

Search by name, or by what you're after — low water, easy, companion to tomato. Filter by type, sort by what's in season now.

Spacing, days to harvest, water and sun at a glance
Seed-starting dates calculated from Canton's frost dates
Care notes for the whole season
Add your own seeds, including OCR from a photo of the packet

The plant library panel with a search for tomato, filter buttons, and an expanded Basil entry showing spacing, harvest days, water, sun, care level and seed-starting notes. — Library, filters and an expanded plantFig.04

03 / Containers

Seven kinds of ground

Not everything is a raised bed. Round pots, planters, grow bags, window boxes, potato towers and in-ground mounds each have their own footprint and their own rules about what will be happy in them.

Mix them freely — the square-foot maths follows the vessel.

A garden of eleven containers across seven types: raised beds, planters, round pots, grow bags, in-ground mounds, a window box and a potato tower. — Container Showcase — 11 vessels, 7 typesFig.05

04 / Reading the garden

What the plan adds up to

A stats strip totals the garden the moment anything changes: plants, varieties, beds in use, average coverage, how many companion pairings you've managed, how many conflicts remain, water demand, and days to first harvest.

Today's Tasks sits above it all — what to sow, transplant and pick this week, with the season's progress bar running February 15 to November 15, the first indoor sowing to the last of the clean-up: thirty-nine weeks.

A statistics strip reading 95 plants, 23 varieties, 4 of 4 beds used, 33% average coverage, 33 companions, 2 conflicts, low average water, 25 days to first harvest. — Live garden statisticsFig.06

A horizontal band of today's tasks listing harvests for kale, marigold, sweet peas, dill and more, with a season progress bar reading week 24 of 39, peak growing. — Today's tasks, week 24 of 39Fig.07

Sec.03

Through the season

Zone 6a

05 / Grow schedule

The whole year as a Gantt chart

Built from what you actually planted, not a generic calendar. Colour-coded for start-indoors, transplant, direct sow and harvest, with every date calibrated to Canton's last frost of April 18 and first frost of October 28.

The grow schedule: a colour-coded Gantt chart of sowing, transplanting and harvest windows arranged by month from February onward. — Grow schedule — 193-day seasonFig.08

06 / Harvest log

Count what actually feeds people

Record every pick in pounds, per bed, with a flag for what went out to the community. Set a season goal and watch the bar fill.

Top producer, best bed, average days between picks
Donation rate — the number that matters for mutual aid
Full harvest history, exportable with the garden

The harvest log showing 15 harvests, 59.9 lbs total, 58.7 lbs distributed to the community, 11 plant varieties, a season goal bar at 40 percent, and season insights. — 59.9 lbs picked · 98% donation rateFig.09

07 / Volunteers

A crew, not a staff roster

Assign beds to people with availability levels, and let the weekly task list generate itself — water checks and weed patrol, per bed, per person.

Built for spotty availability, because mutual aid runs on real life rather than corporate schedules.

The volunteer collective: five crew members with availability badges, four bed assignments, and a generated weekly task list of water checks and weed patrols. — Crew, assignments and the week's tasksFig.10

08 / Climate

Live weather, local frost

Current conditions and a 7-day forecast from Open-Meteo — no key required — with a status readout telling you whether it's an ideal growing temperature and how many days remain until first frost.

Monthly rainfall and growing-season temperature curves are drawn on canvas from Canton's climate record.

Canton climate data: current conditions at 66 degrees, a seven day forecast, monthly rainfall bars peaking in June, and growing season temperature curves. — Climate data — 94 days until first frostFig.11

Sec.04

Garden Buddy

Your key, your browser

09 / The assistant

Ask it to do the planting

Garden Buddy runs on Claude Sonnet 5 with ten tools — it can place plants and pull them back out, clear and organise beds, rename them, apply a template, look up a plant, and answer scheduling questions against your actual garden rather than a generic planting guide.

"Plant tomatoes in Main Veggie Bed." "Set up a Three Sisters garden." "What should I plant this time of year?"

It calls the API straight from your browser with a key you supply — nothing passes through a server of ours, and the garden state travels no further than the request you made.

Garden Buddy, an AI chat panel open over the bed planner, introducing itself and suggesting example commands like planting tomatoes or setting up a Three Sisters garden. — Garden Buddy — Claude with toolsFig.12

Sec.05

The plans

11 demos loaded

Garden	Beds	Season yield	Built for
Full Research Plan	5	400–600 lbs	175 plants across 26 distinct varieties, maximum nutritional diversity, planned around a volunteer rota
Easy Start	5	130–225 lbs	Year one — low-maintenance crops only, minimal inputs, hard to get wrong
Max Storage	5	250–400 lbs	70%+ shelf-stable: potatoes, onions, squash and beans that keep without a fridge
Community Classic	4	95 plants	Salsa garden, cool greens, three sisters and a herb spiral, with a crew of five
Container Showcase	11	60+ plants	Every one of the seven container types, side by side
Three Sisters	4	—	Corn, beans and squash in traditional companion mounds

First visit

The planner opens on Easy Start rather than four empty rectangles. FILE ▸ LOAD DEMO GARDEN switches between all eleven; FILE ▸ NEW GARDEN clears to a blank slate.

Overview of the Full Research Plan: five beds planted for maximum nutritional diversity. — Full Research PlanFig.13

Overview of the Easy Start plan: five beds of low-maintenance crops for a first season. — Easy StartFig.14

Overview of the Max Storage plan: five beds weighted to potatoes, alliums, squash and beans. — Max StorageFig.15

10 / Eleven gardens

Somewhere to start

Every demo is a complete garden — beds, plants, and where it applies a crew, a harvest log and a journal. Load one to explore the app with real data in it, or as the base for your own plot.

The three plans are the researched ones; the rest range from a two-bed beginner plot to a kitchen herb patio and a full container showcase.

The load demo garden dialog listing eleven gardens: Community Classic, Container Showcase, Three Sisters Companion, Kitchen Herb Patio, Beginner Starter, Salsa and Pizza Garden, Our Garden empty and planted, and the three research plans. — All eleven, one click awayFig.16

11 / Light mode

For daylight, and for printing

The whole planner has a light theme — the same beds, companion threads and panels on paper-white rather than OLED black. One button in the header.

The bed planner in light theme: four beds of plants with companion threads on a pale background, with the plant library and bed details panels in matching light styling. — Light theme, same gardenFig.17

Sec.06

The full research plan

Bed by bed

Bed 1, the Greens Powerhouse, planted with leafy greens. — Bed 1 — Greens PowerhouseFig.18

Bed 2, Tomato and Pepper HQ, with nightshades and their companions. — Bed 2 — Tomato & Pepper HQFig.19

Bed 3, the Underground Vault, planted with root crops. — Bed 3 — Underground VaultFig.20

Bed 4, Calorie Central, planted with starchy staples. — Bed 4 — Calorie CentralFig.21

Bed 5, Storage and Protein, planted with beans and keeping crops. — Bed 5 — Storage & ProteinFig.22

A comparison table of the three plans, showing yield, crop count and maintenance level. — All three plans, comparedFig.23

Sec.07

Under the hood

No build step

No tooling: No bundler, no framework, no npm. All 33 modules are plain <script> tags and communicate through one shared global state object. Clone it and open the file.
Rendered by hand: Beds and plants are ordinary DOM elements on a pan-and-zoom surface — inspect one and you'll find a div. The companion threads are an <svg> overlay rebuilt on every change. Only the climate curves and the PNG export touch <canvas>, and they are plotted by hand: no D3, no Chart.js.
Yours to keep: Autosaves to localStorage, with optional Supabase cloud sync. Export JSON, save a PNG, or copy a share link that folds the entire garden into the URL. Full undo/redo.
Offline-first: Everything except weather, the AI features and cloud sync works with no network at all. Nothing requires you to sign in.
AI, on your key: Garden Buddy runs on Claude Sonnet 5 with ten tools — placing and removing plants, clearing and organising beds, answering schedule questions. It calls the API straight from your browser with a key you supply; it never touches a server of ours.
Licence: AGPL-3.0. If you improve it, share the improvements back. Built by and for Food Not Bombs Canton and the wider mutual-aid gardening community.

Sec.08

In the garden

390px and up

GardenSync on a phone: the planner collapses to a single column with the plant library and bed details as slide-up drawers. — The planner on a phone — panels become drawersFig.24

Made for standing in a bed

Responsive to 390px

Below 900px the layout collapses to a single column and the plant library and bed details become slide-up drawers, so the garden itself keeps the full width of the screen. Today's tasks stay pinned at the top — usually the only thing you need while you're actually out there with dirt on your hands.

Open it →