Lunar gardening, built into your dashboard

Gardeners have been timing their sowing, transplanting, and pruning by the moon for centuries. Whether you follow it strictly or just find it a useful second opinion, MyPlot now has it built in — shown on your dashboard, woven into Sprout, and connected to the crop planner.

The Moon Calendar card lives on your dashboard and shows the current phase at a glance — phase name, illumination percentage, and which day of the 29-day cycle you're on. Below that, it surfaces the traditional gardening focus for the current phase: which tasks are well-timed, which are better left for another week, and which of your actual plantings fall into the favoured category right now.

The "Coming up" panel on the right shows the next three phase transitions with their dates, how many days away they are, and what each phase is traditionally good for. If you prefer to plan ahead rather than check daily, this gives you a quick read on the next few weeks without needing to cross-reference anything.

Moon phase context is also passed through to Sprout. When you ask about sowing timing, transplanting, or pruning, Sprout has the current phase available and can factor it in — or mention it unprompted if it's relevant to your question. It treats this the same way a knowledgeable gardening friend would: not as a hard rule, but as a useful consideration alongside weather and plant-specific timing.

In the crop planner, each recommendation now includes a small lunar timing note — whether the current phase is considered a good window for that plant type, or when the next favourable phase is and how many days away. It's a light touch: one line below the planner's main recommendation, easy to ignore if you don't find it useful, helpful if you do.

The Moon Calendar card is off by default — enable it from the Customise panel on your dashboard and resize it to suit. If you keep the Weekly Briefing card enabled, it will also include a moon phase summary at the end of your Sunday report. All of this is built on traditional lunar gardening guidance rather than anything prescriptive: the idea is to surface the information and let you decide how much weight to give it.

We've since taken this further. The Garden Calendar is a dedicated section of MyPlot — its own node in the navigation — giving you a full year, month, week, or day view where every single day is colour-coded by its lunar quarter. At a glance, across the entire year, you can see when the sowing windows open, when root crop and harvest periods fall, and when the soil prep phases land. It's the same data as the dashboard card, but laid out so you can actually plan ahead across seasons rather than just checking what today looks like.

Each of the four views — yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily — is colour-coded with the same system. Teal for sowing leafy greens and herbs, green for fruiting crops and transplanting, amber for root crops and harvest, slate for pruning and soil prep. You can scan a whole month and immediately see where the quiet windows are versus the busy transplanting stretches. The weekly view overlays your reminders directly onto each day, so you can see at a glance whether a reminder you've set lines up with a good phase for the task.

The daily view goes a level deeper. It shows the full moon phase card with illumination percentage, a "Good today / Avoid today" task split that accounts for both the lunar quarter and your actual season, your upcoming phase transitions with countdowns, and an AI recommendation generated specifically for that date. The recommendation pulls in your local weather — temperature, frost risk, expected rain — alongside your active plantings and the current phase. It's cached permanently for past and present days so it loads instantly on repeat visits; for future days it shows a preview based on the forecast, which refreshes automatically if conditions change.

The task lists in the daily view used to be based on lunar phase alone, which meant the same advice came up regardless of what month it was. That's now fixed: the "Good today" and "Avoid today" lists are generated from a season-and-phase grid — 16 combinations covering all four seasons and all four lunar quarters. In winter, a waxing crescent phase suggests sowing under cover and checking protected beds, not sowing basil in full sun. In summer, the same phase suggests shade cloth and checking germination in hot beds. The season drives the specifics; the phase sets the timing.

The Garden Calendar lives under its own nav item. Tap Calendar in the sidebar to jump straight to it, or navigate to any specific date from the daily or monthly views. Like the dashboard card, it's built on traditional lunar gardening principles — it's there to inform your timing, not prescribe it.