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Recording the common things

A flock or a herd starts from Livestock: give it a name, a breed, and how it arrived, bought or hatched. Feed it, weigh it, and log the day it is culled or sold from the same place. A planting starts from Garden: sow it, transplant it if it started under cover, and pick from it as it comes in. A purchase goes under Costs, and can be split across more than one flock or bed if that is what it actually paid for: a bag of feed shared by two pens, or a delivery of compost spread across three beds. Splitting it is optional and can be partial — whatever you have not split yet still counts as money spent, and shows up on its own, as “Unallocated,” on the dashboard and in Insights rather than against any flock, bed or machine. Put a share on the wrong flock? Remove just that share and its money goes back to not yet split, ready to split again. An entry recorded by mistake can be struck from the log it appears in, with a note saying what was wrong; it stays visible, crossed out, and stops counting. Striking a named bird’s death, sale or gift puts her back in the flock’s count and back on her own page as one of the flock.

Wondering what your eggs really cost? Egg cost per dozen calculator, free and with no account.

Birds you want to follow

Most birds are counted rather than named: a flock of forty is a number that goes down when you record a loss. For a bird you want to follow on her own, open her flock and choose “Name a bird”. Give her a name and, if you like, a leg band, a hatch date, a breed, a sire and a dam. Her page keeps her own history: her status whenever it changes (point of lay, laying, broody, molting, sick, injured or recovered), her photos, and your notes. When she leaves the flock, record it from her page as a death, a sale or “Gave away”, and the flock’s count goes down with her. Several unnamed birds given away together go in the flock’s own “Gave away” form. Retiring a profile is only for a bird entered by mistake: it hides her and leaves the count alone, and Undo, or Restore on her page, puts her back if you retired the wrong one.

Beds and the planner

Under Garden, Beds, describe each bed by its real length and width, and it is drawn as a grid of squares. Pick squares, then either sow now or plan for later. A plan holds next season’s layout without being a planting yet: it counts toward none of the free plan’s limits, stays out of every cost and yield figure, and can sit on squares this season’s crop still fills. When the seeds actually go in, press “These went in” on the plan and it becomes a planting from the date you give. A plan dated out of season says why the date looks off, and is never refused.

When two crops side by side are known to help or hinder each other, the bed says so, and labels each note researched, traditional or disputed, so garden lore is never passed off as settled fact. Each bed also suggests what would fill it, counted in plants for its real size, and what could follow a crop that is nearly done and still finish before your first frost. If two sweet corn plantings are close enough in type and timing to cross-pollinate, the Garden page warns you.

The crop catalog has flowers and cover crops beside the vegetables and herbs, grouped by what each is grown for when you pick one. A crop the catalog does not have can be added, for now, only through a connected assistant: there is no form for it in the app yet.

The seed vault

Record a seed packet under Garden, Seed vault when you buy it, with how many seeds are in it if you know. When you sow, pick the packet it came from and the seeds are drawn out for you, so what is left is worked out rather than typed. A packet you never counted can be marked empty by hand, and “Still have some” puts it back.

Equipment

Under Equipment, add each machine you would be stuck without: what it is and, if you like, when you got it, what it cost, and a note for the model or serial number. Each time you change the oil or sharpen a blade, record the job on its page, with what it cost, how long it took, and the hour meter reading if it has one. The page shows what the machine has cost you so far, per year owned and, when it has an hour meter, per hour run. Add a reminder, every so many months or every so many hours run, and when one comes due it appears under “Needs doing” on the home page. Fuel or oil bought for a machine can be split to it under Costs like any other purchase. An assistant can do all of this for you too.

Income

A sale is recorded against the thing it came from: eggs, live birds, or meat against a flock, and produce against a planting, where plants and seedlings you sell count as produce. Record it from that flock or planting’s page, or from Income, where you pick what was sold, then what it came from, then how much and what you were paid. Nothing is picked for you under “From”, so a sale never lands on the wrong flock. Live birds come off the flock’s count, the same as a loss does; meat does not, because those birds already left when they were processed. Income lists every sale with the year’s totals by kind, and the dashboard shows what has come in since January beside what was spent. Money received never lowers a cost per dozen or per pound: the flock and planting pages show the average price you got beside what it cost to produce. Who bought it goes in the notes. Recording a sale needs a connection.

If you sell from a farmstand, a table at the end of the drive or a cooler by the mailbox, add it under Income, Stands. A stand has a name and nothing else: no address. When you record a sale from Income, pick the stand under “Sold at”. The sale still counts on the flock or planting it came from; the stand’s page shows everything sold there, by item and by month, beside the stand’s own costs, such as a cooler or a sign you split to it under Costs.

Goods and the farmstand

Goods are things you make or resell rather than raise or grow: bread, jam, soap, a wreath, a neighbor’s honey. Add each one under Income, Goods, with a name and, if you like, a note. Sell it from Income by choosing Goods, the way you sell eggs from a flock. What went into it, the flour and the jars, is a purchase you split to it under Costs, and its page shows its sales beside what was charged to it.

An honor box is counted, not rung up. When you have a stand, “Count the stand” is the first button on the home page, and it opens the count for today with your stand already chosen. Type how many of each item were taken (or what you put out and what is left), the price you asked, the cash in the box, and whatever came in by transfer. Each item becomes a sale at the stand, and the money is divided among them in proportion to what each should have brought, to the cent, so the day’s sales add up to exactly what you received. What the box should have held at your prices is shown as you type and kept in the day’s note; it is never counted as money. If you count on Sunday for Friday to Sunday, tick “This count covers several days” and give the first day: the sales are dated Sunday, and remember that they covered three days. Live birds and meat are not counted this way; record them as ordinary sales with the stand under “Sold at”.

Your prices live under Income, Prices: what each item sells for, per dozen, per loaf or per jar, from a date. The count fills them in for the day you are counting, and you can type over one for that day, or tick to keep it as the price from then on. A new price starts on its own day and never changes an earlier one, so the stand’s page can show, day by day and week by week, what the box should have held at the prices of the time against what it held, and how much went missing (or came in over). An item with no price that day is left out and named, not guessed.

The stand’s page also shows how many of each item sold there week by week, each item’s average price beside what it cost you per dozen or per piece from the costs charged to it, and each month’s takings beside the stand’s own costs and what the box was short. A count that covered several days is shared out evenly across them, so a weekend reads as a weekend rather than one busy Sunday. There is no single “stand profit”: your hens’ feed also paid for the eggs you ate and sold elsewhere. Insights has a “Stand sales by item” chart of the same thing.

Farmstead Helper records what you sold. It does not know your state's rules for selling eggs or home-baked food, which vary widely; your state's agriculture department or extension office does.

Notes and the notebook

The forms that record something have a notes box, and a note stays with its entry wherever that entry is shown. For a thought that belongs to no one record, such as the name of the man selling hay or what to plant earlier next spring, use the Notebook. A note there is yours alone unless you tick “Share with the homestead”. Shared, everyone in the homestead can read it, and anyone who can make changes can edit it. Unshared keeps it out of everyone else’s notebook, but it is not locked away from them, so don’t keep passwords there. Notes are archived rather than deleted, and your notebook downloads from your account alongside your records.

Photos

Add a photo, with a caption if you like, from the page of a flock, a bird, a planting or a bed. A bed’s first photo stands for it on the list of beds. The cull and pick forms take a photo too, and it stays on that entry. On the free plan a homestead holds 50 photos; Pro has no limit. Removing a photo asks twice.

Finding things again

The search box at the top of every page looks through the names and notes of everything in the homestead: flocks, birds, plantings, beds, seed packets, machines, purchases, your log entries and the notebook. Every word you type has to appear in the same record or note. A log entry in the results opens the page it belongs to, scrolled to that entry. Entries you struck out and photo captions are not searched.

What “derived, not stored” means

Nothing you see on the dashboard, the insights page, or a planting’s cost-per-pound is typed in anywhere. It is worked out, every time the page loads, from the events you recorded: purchases, harvests, feed, deaths, sales. Record a late harvest or fix a mis-typed weight and every figure downstream of it is correct on the next page load, with nothing to go back and update by hand. This is also why there is no separate “edit the season plan” step: the season calendar and the succession suggestions are worked out from your frost dates and your existing records the same way, so there is nothing stored to go stale.

Cost per dozen works the same way: it is worked out from the feed and eggs you recorded, not typed in anywhere.

Entering frost dates

Frost dates live on the homestead. In the United States, once you save the homestead’s location they are estimated for you from the nearest NOAA climate station’s 1991-2020 records, and the page shows which station, how far away it is, how much higher or lower, and the range of dates across years rather than one day. The zone is looked up from the USDA hardiness zone map data the same way. An estimate is a starting point: you know your own microclimate better than any station does, so type your own dates and they are kept, and no later estimate ever changes them. Every sow-date suggestion and the season calendar are computed from these dates, and changing them updates every suggestion that depends on them immediately. The dates are used for every year, so you do not have to enter them again each season: the year you saved them with does not matter, and each planting is judged against the frost dates for the season it was sown in. Outside the United States, or with no location set, enter them yourself.

Want to look up frost dates without an account? Frost dates by ZIP or postcode, free and with no account.

The free frost dates tool shows the same estimate from a ZIP code or postcode. It looks the postcode up on our own server and does not save it or send it anywhere.

A tray started indoors is due for a bed six weeks after you sowed it, except for a frost-tender crop — a tomato, a pepper, a melon — which also waits for your last spring frost plus about two weeks, whichever is later. Planting one out on the six-week mark alone can mean setting it into a frost that kills it. If that date would still fall after your first fall frost, the garden page and the dashboard both say so, so you know to keep it under cover rather than plant it out.

The location itself can be given four ways: a street address, a postcode, your device’s location, or the coordinates typed in. Each one fills in the coordinates for you to check before you save, and the page says how precise the result is. A postcode is the middle of an area that can be miles across, so it is marked approximate; for frost alerts you can rely on, use your address or your device’s location.

A brand-new homestead asks for its location before anything else: the dashboard shows a “Set your location” card above the “Start a flock” and “Plan a bed” shortcuts, linking straight to this section, because the location is what every sowing window and the frost-tonight alert are worked out from. “Not now” puts the card away in this browser only — it comes back if you start a second homestead or open the app somewhere else.

The email summary of what needs doing

The list on the dashboard of what needs you can also arrive by email, so you do not have to remember to open the app. It is off until you turn it on: open Account, choose Email notifications, and pick Daily or Weekly. It is a setting for you, not for the homestead, so each person sharing one chooses for themselves. The email carries the same items the dashboard does — what is ready to harvest, what is ready to plant out, a seed packet that has run out, a flock nobody has recorded anything for in a while, and equipment whose maintenance is overdue — with a link to each, across every homestead you belong to. When nothing needs you, no email is sent at all, rather than one saying all is well. Every email ends with a link back to that page, where Off turns it off. The frost-tonight email below is a separate setting on the same page, so choosing Off here does not touch it.

The frost-tonight email

If you have saved the homestead’s location (see Entering frost dates above), the app checks the short-range forecast for that spot and emails you on a night when the forecast low is at or below the temperature you set, which starts at 34°F. Change it with the “Alert at or below” box under the location on the Homestead page. It is one email a night at most, and it comes from tonight’s actual forecast, not from your frost dates: those set the season’s sowing windows, not a night-by-night warning. With no location saved, no email is sent.

It is its own setting, off until you turn it on: open Account, choose Email notifications, and set Frost alert to On. It is a setting for you, not for the homestead, so each person sharing one chooses for themselves, and it does not depend on the email summary above in either direction. It needs the homestead’s location saved, as described here, because that is what the forecast is looked up for. A location typed from a postcode is only approximate, so for a warning you can rely on, use your address or your device’s location.

Fixing a name or a note

A typo in a name is never permanent. On the Livestock, Garden, Seeds and Equipment lists, choose Edit beside a record to change its name and its notes; a purchase is renamed on the Costs page, a variety you added on the Varieties page, and a named bird’s name, leg band, sex and hatch date from Edit details on her own page. Only the label and the notes change. The numbers you recorded against it stay exactly as they were: a wrong count or amount is struck and entered again, so the history always shows what was corrected. A machine’s price and purchase date work the same way: strike the wrong one on the Costs page, then open the machine and record the right price, the right date, or both — the same form the Equipment page uses when a machine is added. A named bird’s status history can be corrected the same way, entry by entry, from her own page — and so can a death, sale or gift logged in error: strike it from her own page and she goes back to the flock, the same as striking it from the flock’s own log does. A seed packet is the one exception, corrected instead by a recount, described next.

A planned planting in a bed — something you have designed but not yet sown — can be edited the same way before it goes in: choose Edit on its row in the bed’s own plan list to change its name, its crop or variety, its planned date, and its notes. To move it or change its size, choose Move squares on the same row: its squares light up on the grid, and tapping or clicking a square (or pressing Enter or Space on it) adds or removes it. Save squares keeps the new ones; Cancel, or Escape, leaves the plan where it was. Nothing else about the plan changes.

Recounting a seed packet

If you typed 500 seeds for a packet of 50, or a sowing came out with the wrong number, open the packet on the Seeds page and choose Recount. Say how many seeds are actually in it today and the day you counted them, and that becomes the new running total: it goes down again with anything sown after the day you counted, but nothing sown or bought before that day changes it. The old, wrong entry stays in the packet’s history rather than being struck out, because a seed packet’s count cannot be struck the way a purchase or a harvest can, and a recount is the way to put it right instead. A count of zero just means the packet is empty. One thing to know: if you later delete a planting that was sown before your most recent recount, its seeds are not added back to the packet, since the recount already accounts for them.

Crops and varieties the catalog does not have

The shipped catalog covers about 35 vegetables. If you grow something it does not have — a flower, an herb, anything at all — add it as a crop of your own on the Varieties page: a name and how far apart the plants go is all it needs. It then works everywhere a shipped crop does — the bed planner, sow-window suggestions, its own varieties — because the app does not treat it any differently. Add a variety of your own the same way, whether it is a cultivar of a crop we ship or one you just added.

Archiving versus deleting

Archiving retires a record without losing its history: a flock that is finished, a bed that is empty for the season, a seed packet that is used up, a crop or variety you added yourself that you no longer grow. An archived record stops counting toward the free plan’s limits and drops out of the active lists — and, for a crop or variety, out of the picker for a new planting or plan — by default, but every event it ever had stays in your history and in your exports, and a planting that already names one still shows it correctly. Deleting is different: it requires the record to be archived first, asks twice, and cannot be undone. Archive first, and only delete something you are sure you will never need to look back at. A named bird retired by mistake is listed under Retired birds on her flock’s page — folded shut, since the ordinary question is who is in the flock now — with a Restore button to put her back. A bird whose death, sale or gift was logged wrong has no Restore button; strike that entry on her page and she returns to the flock with its count.

When you archive something, a line at the bottom of the screen says so, with an Undo button if you pressed Archive by mistake. It stays until you close it or move to another page. After that, an archived record is still there: turn on “Show archived” on its list to find it, and restore it from there.

Exporting

Every event you have ever recorded (one row per measurement, in the units you typed) downloads as a spreadsheet from your account, free, on any plan, at any time. That includes events with no number attached, like a transplanting with no count, because a thing that happened is worth a row even when it has nothing to measure. A second free download lists the records themselves: every flock, bird, planting, bed, piece of equipment, farmstand, good and purchase you have, active or archived, with its name, status and notes, so a bed nobody has sown yet or a mower that has never been serviced leaves too. A third lists every purchase you split across more than one flock, bed or planting, and how. Pro additionally exports the worked-out figures: cost per pound, yield per square foot, and the rest of the arithmetic the app does for you.

Bringing in a spreadsheet

If you already keep a list, you do not have to type it in again. Flocks, plantings and beds can each be imported from a CSV file, one kind per file: while Livestock, Garden or Beds is still empty, follow “Already keeping a list? Import it.”, or go straight to Bulk import. Download the template, fill it in, and upload it. Nothing is added until you have checked the preview, which marks any row with a problem, and then everything goes in at once or nothing does. On the free plan, an import that would take you past 6 active flocks and plantings is refused before anything is added.

Offline capture

Four things can be logged with no signal: eggs collected, feed, a harvest, and losses. Log one in the coop or out in the field and it is held on the device until a connection comes back, then syncs on its own. Nothing is lost by being offline when you record one of them, and there is no separate “offline mode” to turn on: it is simply what happens when a request cannot reach the server. Everything else, a purchase or a sale included, needs a connection to actually save. If one of those fails for lack of signal, what you typed is not sent — but it is not thrown away either: it is kept on this device only, and filled back in the next time you open that same form, so a walk back to the house does not cost you the typing. Nothing is ever sent on its own; you still press save once you are back in range.

Sharing the homestead

The people who help can have their own sign-in to the same homestead. An owner or an admin invites them from the Homestead page, and they get an email with a link. Each person has a role: an owner can do everything, including billing; an admin everything except billing, and can invite people; a member can record and change anything on the homestead; and a viewer can look at everything and change nothing. Only an owner can make someone an admin. The free plan has room for 2 people, counting invitations not yet accepted.

Talking to an assistant instead of typing it in

Tell your assistant what happened, on your phone, and it logs it and checks your work the same way the app would, under access the homestead owner controls per person. Setting it up, what the approval screen shows, what an assistant can and cannot do, and how to cut one off again are all covered on their own page: Connect an AI assistant.

Getting in touch

Write to support@farmsteadhelper.com for anything this page does not answer: a question about your account, a bug, or a feature you wish existed. A person reads it.

That person is the one who builds it, on his own homestead. Why I built this is the longer version.