Know exactly what your garden produces.
Log every harvest with weight, quantity, and quality. Track total yield by plant, bed, or season. Compare varieties year on year. After two seasons of records, you'll know which plants earn their space and which don't.
Most gardeners have a general sense of what did well last season. The tomatoes were great. The beans were disappointing. The zucchini — well, there was certainly a lot of zucchini. But ask for specifics — total yield from the Roma tomatoes in bed 2 across the whole season, quality rating over time, how that compares to the cherry tomatoes in bed 4 — and the answer is usually a shrug.
That gap matters. Without accurate yield data, you're planting by feel every season. You don't know which variety is genuinely most productive in your conditions. You don't know whether the extra bed of beans was worth it. You can't tell whether your soil improvement over winter actually made a difference.
Harvest tracking turns that intuition into data. After a season or two of records, the decisions that were guesswork become obvious.
Harvest data becomes most useful in aggregate. MyPlot's harvest reports let you cut the data several ways:
- By plant. Total yield across all seasons for each species and variety. See which tomato variety has produced the most over three years.
- By bed. Which area of your garden produces the most food? Is the new raised bed performing better than the old in-ground patch?
- By season. Was this year's summer better or worse than last year? Total food grown, by season, with a year-on-year trend.
- By quality. Filter harvests by quality rating to find your consistently best-performing varieties across multiple plantings.
At the end of a season, Sprout can generate a written debrief of how your garden performed. It reads through all your harvest records, event logs, and observations and produces a plain-English summary: what worked, what struggled, what the data suggests you should do differently next time.
This isn't a generic end-of-summer checklist. It's specific to your garden, your varieties, and your season. The tomatoes in bed 3 produced 40% less than bed 1 — and looking at the event logs, they also received half as much fertiliser. That kind of observation only emerges from structured data.
Harvest days shouldn't become data entry days. MyPlot gives you several fast ways to get harvest records in:
Open Quick Log from the sidebar, select a planting, tap Harvest, enter the weight. Five seconds per harvest. Designed to work with one hand while the other is holding produce.
Speak your harvests as you pick. "Harvested 600 grams of cherry tomatoes from bed 4" becomes a structured record automatically. No stopping, no typing.
Tell Sprout what you picked. It creates a draft harvest event linked to the right planting and asks you to confirm before saving. Useful when you're not sure of the bed number and want Sprout to work it out from context.
Open any planting and log the harvest directly on its timeline. Gives you the full event form with all fields if you want to record quality, notes, and photos at the same time.
The first season of harvest records is useful. The second season is more useful. By the third, you have a genuine multi-year data set that makes variety selection, bed planning, and rotation decisions straightforward rather than instinctive.
MyPlot stores your full history with no limits. Every harvest you've ever logged remains queryable in reports, searchable via Sprout, and visible in planting timelines. The value of the records grows with every season you add.
After two growing seasons with consistent harvest records, most MyPlot users can identify their two or three highest-value plants, their single most productive bed, and at least one variety they've been growing for years that the data shows they should replace.