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It opens on the date, your climate zone and everything whose window is open today: sowing under cover, sowing outdoors, planting out, pruning, grafting, picking. Entries fade as their window closes, so what is about to end is visible at once. Above the list there is a search field, and that is where the second question goes: when do I prune the pomegranate?
What it does
- Today, not an almanac to leaf through: the first screen is already the work.
- Search for a plant by English, Italian or scientific name and read its whole year: every window drawn across the twelve months, with the dates spelled out.
- Your own plants: a star keeps them aside, and the «Mine» filter shows only those.
- The rule, not just the date: next to the pruning window it says why it falls there — stone fruit is pruned in the warm season because winter cuts invite canker; shrubs that flower on last year's wood are pruned after flowering, or you cut off next year's flowers.
- 194 plants: vegetables and herbs, fruit trees, soft fruit, ornamentals, roses, climbers, hedges and bulbs.
- Twelve European climate zones, from Seville to Oulu: Milan and Seville do not sow on the same day.
- The moon, computed for the moment, with the line that says it is tradition and not agronomy.
- In English and Italian, following the phone's language.
Where the dates come from
The sowing and harvesting dates for vegetables are not invented: they come from the Edible Plant Database of the GROW Observatory (University of Dundee, DOI 10.15132/10000157), published under CC BY 4.0, which gives them for twelve European climate zones. The citation is a condition of the licence and travels with the data all the way to the plant's card.
Pruning is another matter: an open, machine-readable pruning calendar per species does not exist. So in Sprout pruning is a rule per category — pome fruit, stone fruit, shrubs that flower on old wood, repeat-flowering roses, spring bulbs — and every plant says which category it belongs to. That table is written for this app and is indicative for central and northern Italy: the app says so on screen rather than letting you assume otherwise.
There is no weather, and that is a choice: the moment the calendar depends on a forecast, the app depends on a service. This is a calendar, not an oracle.
Your data stays yours
Sprout asks for no permission at all: no location, no camera, no file access. The calendar is inside the app and works in flight mode. The one thing the app remembers is the climate zone you picked, and it stays on the phone. The only data that leaves the device is what Google AdMob collects for the banner, and the privacy policy spells it out.
How it is paid for
One banner anchored at the bottom, and that is all: no ads inside the app, no subscription, no feature held hostage.