What started as a Kickstarter campaign in 2021, and was funded in 10 minutes, Seedtime — a crop planning and scheduling app — has grown to over 400,000 users in more than 30 countries.
Founded by Edwin and Paul Dysinger, Seedtime was created as a digital companion for hobby gardeners. The app is growing with new uses on working farms, with its visual calendar tools, succession planting features and regionally tailored timelines increasingly resonating with small to mid-size farmers.
As more producers seek tech solutions to simplify labor planning and optimize yields, Seedtime is emerging as a surprisingly practical tool for the modern farm.
Seedtime differentiates itself by starting with a calendar to plan crop growth and succession planting, rather than focusing on layout. It caters to both home gardeners and small to medium-sized farmers, offering a visual calendar to track planting and harvest schedules and a layout planner for spatial tracking. Paul Dysinger says farmers appreciate its custom task series for various gardening tasks and its scalability for large acreages. The app also supports regenerative agriculture principles, such as crop rotation and companion planting.
Seedtime takes a different approach than other gardening apps, says Paul Dysinger, CEO and co-founder of Seedtime, as it starts with the calendar (versus a layout) to help users determine which plants to grow, and when they’ll be in season. It helps, Dysinger says, because growers can see gaps in the growing season, allowing for succession planting.
“It also helps people visualize and see what kind of succession plantings they can do,” he says. “We come from a small market farm background ourselves, and when you are farming, you’ve got to have a pipeline of crops that are available, specifically in the intensive vegetable production farming space, which is where Seedtime kind of plays into a little bit more. But in that space, you’ve got to have this pipeline of crops that are coming on, because you want to be having fresh stuff for the farmers market or your subscription boxes or whatever, wherever you’re selling those items.”
“So we basically took that same concept but pulled it into the home garden space so that home gardeners can easily create a pipeline of crops growing out of their garden,” Dysinger continues. “A home gardener could basically replace the grocery store with their backyard garden, instead of it just being a one-time and done thing where they seed everything in the spring, get a harvest and then it’s done.”
The calendar allows growers to see their planting schedules in a timeline from seed to harvest, allowing them to work backward to adjust timing.
“There have not been a lot of good tools out there that easily let people see their planting schedules in a timeline,” Dysinger says. “With Seedtime, they’re able to move the harvest to when they want it to be, and the calendar will automatically calculate back to the seeding date for them. It opens up the game for small production farmers to be able to plan their whole season visually.”
A recent rollout is the app’s layout planner that allows users to track crops in both time and space.
“So you can see, not only on the calendar, when that crop is going to be in the ground, but once you’ve assigned it to a location in your farm or field, then you can see when that crop is going to be taking up space in that field,” Dysinger says. “This allows people to sort of time travel, as it were, through the year and see when crops are there, when they’ll be harvested out and when something else could be going in. It allows people to walk through their season down to week-to-week basics.”
Regenerative focused themselves, Dysinger says, in addition to teaching people the six principles of regenerative agriculture, they’ve included regenerative practices in the app itself.
“So they can plan crop rotations, they can plan companion planting on their farm or in their gardens. We recently added companion planting suggestions and plants to avoid in the layout so people can easily see, based on their growing zone, which crops would be good to grow with or without.”
Although originally designed for the home grower, Dysinger says the calendar is scalable for larger growers.
“The calendar is very scalable,” he says. “You can add an unlimited number of crops, so you could use the layout for very large acreage if you wanted. We have market gardeners with multiple acres that are using it — we kind of started home-garden centric, and have been moving into the farm space.”
A free Seedtime account includes:
- Click and drop gardening calendar to easily visualize when to seed, transplant, harvest and more based on user’s local area.
- Over 130 built-in crops/flowers with 9,000-plus built-in varieties (or upgrade to add to a user’s custom crops).
- Unlimited planting schedules, task lists and journal entries.
- Entire masterclass video lesson series.
- Private gardening community.
- Seedstore with natural fertilizers, organic pest control and more.
