Plants
The fifth asset type in Kepthouse. Free, and built for UK gardens.
Plants sit alongside appliances, vehicles, pets and properties as a fifth asset type. Trees, houseplants, flowers, edible crops. Type a plant name, look it up from a 350,000-species catalogue, and Kepthouse fills in hardiness, sun, watering, soil pH, flowering and pruning months. Push reminders for watering, pruning, feeding and mulching. Real-time frost and disease warnings matched to your plants and your postcode. All free.
The problem
- Everything you need to remember is scattered across Instagram saves, seed packets, and RHS bookmarks
- You plant something in spring and can't remember what it was by August
- You lose track of which tomatoes survived and which the slugs got
- Pruning schedules vary by species and you're never sure which month is right
- Frost date for your area? Who knows.
The fix
One asset type. Every plant in your home and garden, with its species data, care schedule, harvest log, and frost reminders. Real-time warnings when frost, blight, or disease conditions are heading your way. Set it up once, and Kepthouse handles the rest — matched to the species, your postcode, and your local weather.
Type a name. The app fills in the rest.
Backed by a catalogue of over 350,000 plant species (GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, Wikidata, Wikipedia, and hand-curated UK garden data) hosted on my servers, so corrections go live immediately without waiting for an app update.
- Common name and scientific name both supported (type either)
- RHS hardiness rating (H1a–H7), sun preference, watering needs, soil pH range
- Flowering and pruning months, edibility flag, plant family, hardiness zone
- Wikipedia summary pulled in automatically
- Works offline once looked up; species data is cached on the device
Watering, pruning, feeding, mulching
- Watering — every 2, 7 or 14 days based on the species, with a per-plant override
- Pruning — on the 1st of each pruning month for the species; pick which months from a checklist
- Feeding — 1st and 15th of April through September for annual edibles
- Mulching — 1st of October for outdoor perennials
- Skip November–February toggle on watering for outdoor plants
- Mark as done button on every reminder with “last done N days ago”. Tap when you've watered and the next reminder reschedules correctly
- Plant Care section on the dashboard shows what's due today / tomorrow / this week
- Dates also appear on the calendar alongside tasks and vehicle reminders
Track what you grow, eat and lose
- Harvests — record each pick with sensible default units (kg for tomatoes, handful for basil, count for courgettes). Auto-enabled for edibles.
- Losses — log reasons (slugs, frost, disease, drought). Automatically decrements your “still alive” count for crops.
- Soil pH readings per bed, so every plant in that bed sees the latest reading against its recommended range.
- Single plants (an apple tree, a named rose) or whole crops (20 tomatoes, a row of carrots). The count tracks planted vs still-alive.
- Wishlist plants kept separate from what you've actually planted.
Built for UK gardens
Link a plant to a property and Kepthouse uses the property postcode to look up regional UK frost dates: 124 UK postcode areas grouped into 15 climate regions, sourced from long-term Met Office averages curated for the app.
- Last frost and first frost dates shown on the plant screen
- Winter-pause toggle on watering respects regional frost dates automatically
- Allotment at a different postcode? Override it on the plant
- RHS hardiness ratings map directly to UK zones, so there's no USDA data to translate
Frost, disease, and outbreak alerts for your garden
Kepthouse checks the weather at your property's postcode and warns you when conditions put your plants at risk. Warnings are matched to the actual species you grow — no generic "it might be cold" noise.
- Frost warnings — when overnight temperatures are forecast below 2°C and you have tender plants outdoors, you get a push notification graded by severity (critical, high, or medium)
- Late blight — triggered by the Hutton Criteria (two consecutive warm, humid days). Only fires if you grow potatoes or tomatoes
- Leaf diseases — apple scab, rose blackspot, brown rot and others, flagged when prolonged mild, damp weather creates ideal conditions for your specific plants
- Powdery mildew — flagged during extended hot, dry spells
- Outbreak alerts — when a pest or disease outbreak is officially reported near your area, Kepthouse checks whether your plants are on the affected species list
- Gale warnings — high winds forecast in the next 24 hours. Stake tall plants and move pots
- Rainfall tracking — recent rain flagged so you know when to skip watering
- Indoor plants are excluded automatically — only outdoor plants linked to a property are checked
- One notification per warning type per property per week — no spam
FAQ
Is this free?
Yes. Plants are free to add and care reminders are free to enable. No separate gardening subscription. Plants count towards the 15-item free limit the same as any other asset type.
Where does the species data come from?
GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, Wikidata, Wikipedia, and hand-curated UK garden data. Full attribution on the Plant Data Sources page. Corrections flagged in-app go to a server-side queue I review manually. Approved fixes go live to all devices without waiting for an app update.
What if my plant isn't in the catalogue?
You can enter all the care data manually. Every field the lookup fills in is editable. Common houseplants, vegetables, fruit trees and UK garden plants are all well covered. More obscure species may need manual entry.
Can I track plants without getting reminders?
Yes. Care reminders are a per-plant toggle. Turn them off on plants you just want to log without notifications. The harvest log, loss log, and pH readings still work.
Does this work for houseplants?
Yes. The Indoor toggle on each plant's location tells Kepthouse to skip frost-based winter-pause behaviour and exclude the plant from plant warnings. Watering and pruning reminders still fire as normal.
How do plant warnings work?
Kepthouse pulls weather forecast data for your property's postcode and runs it against known disease triggers (Hutton Criteria for blight, prolonged damp for leaf diseases, dry heat for mildew). Warnings are matched to the species you actually grow, so you only see alerts that are relevant. Outbreak alerts come from official DEFRA reports and verified sources. All of this runs in the background — you don't need to do anything except link your plants to a property.
Can I turn the warnings off?
Yes. Go to More > Settings and toggle Plant Warnings off. Warnings are on by default.
Where does the weather data come from?
Forecast data from met.no (the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, free under CC-BY 4.0), rainfall data from the Environment Agency (Open Government Licence), and postcodes resolved via postcodes.io. Disease and outbreak data is curated from DEFRA bulletins and GBIF species occurrence records. Full attribution on the Plant Data Sources page.
Start tracking your plants
Plants is built into Kepthouse. Free on Android, no sign-up required.