The garden planner app that works with no signal.

Niwa is a free native iPhone garden planner that draws your beds on a square-foot grid, builds a planting calendar from your grow zone and frost dates, and ships with a 200+ plant library. The difference from web-based planners like the Old Farmer's Almanac Garden Planner or VegPlotter is that Niwa is a real iOS app: it works fully offline, needs no account, and doesn't put your first garden behind a subscription.

Measure your bed, divide it into one-foot squares, then assign each square a crop based on its mature spacing, sun requirement and height. Tall crops go on the north side so they don't shade shorter ones, plants with similar watering needs get grouped, and you leave a path every four feet so you can reach the middle without compacting the soil. Niwa does the spacing arithmetic as you drag plants onto the grid, so a layout that would take an evening on graph paper takes about ten minutes.

Square foot gardening uses four densities. One plant per square for large crops: tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, eggplant. Four per square for lettuce, chard, basil and marigolds. Nine per square for bush beans, beets, spinach and turnips. Sixteen per square for carrots, radishes, onions and scallions. Niwa applies the correct density automatically the moment you drop a plant on the grid, and shows the count on the square.

Planting dates come from your last spring frost and first fall frost, not from the calendar month. Zone 5 and zone 8 are weeks apart in April. Cool-season crops like peas, spinach and brassicas go in four to six weeks before your last frost. Warm-season crops like tomatoes, peppers, beans and squash go in one to two weeks after it, once soil temperature is up. Set your location in Niwa and every plant in the library gets a personal sow, transplant and harvest window.

The pairings that genuinely cost you yield: fennel next to almost anything, alliums (onion, garlic, chives, leeks) next to beans and peas, tomatoes next to brassicas or potatoes, and dill near carrots once it bolts. Most other "enemies" you'll find on Pinterest charts are folklore. Niwa flags a genuinely combative pairing the moment you place the second plant, while it's still a plan you can change, not a bed you've already dug.

Basil, marigolds, chives, garlic, borage, parsley, carrots and lettuce all earn their place next to tomatoes: basil and marigolds for pest pressure, borage and parsley for the beneficial insects they pull in, lettuce and carrots because they use the space tomatoes leave empty low down. Keep brassicas, potatoes, corn and fennel away. In Niwa, the tomato plant page lists its good companions and combative pairs, and the grid shows companion markers directly on the bed.

You rotate by plant family, not by individual crop. Tomatoes and potatoes are both nightshades, radishes are brassicas, and the soil doesn't care what you call them. Aim for three to four years before a family returns to the same soil, and longer for alliums, whose white rot survives as sclerotia for a decade. In a small bed you rotate square by square rather than by whole bed. Niwa records the family in every square each season and warns you with the exact year that ground is clear again.

Count backwards from your last frost date. Peppers and eggplant need eight to ten weeks, tomatoes six to eight, brassicas four to six, and cucumbers and squash only three to four. Start those too early and you get leggy, root-bound transplants that never catch up. Niwa runs that subtraction for every plant using your own frost date and puts the resulting sow-indoors date straight on your calendar.

Yes, completely. The full 200+ plant library, your garden layouts, your planting calendar, your diary and your seed inventory all live on your device. The app behaves identically at the far end of an allotment with one bar of signal as it does on wifi. There's no account to create and nothing to sync, which is also why there's nothing to leak.

Niwa is free to download and free to plan a garden with. Optional All Access and Premium upgrades unlock advanced features for a one-off or recurring price, but nothing is required to lay out your first bed. There is no tracking, no analytics SDK, no advertising and no account, so your garden data never leaves your iPhone. That's a design decision, not a feature we're saving for a paid tier.