Cold Frame

A sowing diary records what you did. It cannot tell you how many seeds to put in the tray.

That answer runs backwards through germination, pricking out, potting on and hardening off — and the losses MULTIPLY.

SOW THE RIGHT NUMBER
• Four stages at 90% survival is 65.6%, not 60%. Cold Frame divides your target by the PRODUCT of the rates, so the sowing actually fills the order
• It shows what subtracting the losses would have given you, side by side, so you can see the gap rather than take it on trust
• Rates are yours, not a packet's. Record what a finished batch really produced and the app tells you which crops are optimistic and by how much

WORK BACKWARDS FROM THE DATE
• You are given a delivery date, not a sowing week
• The app walks your protocol in reverse and tells you when to start — often three weeks ago, which is worth knowing on the day the order is taken
• Anchor a batch either way: ready by a date, or sown on a date

FIND THE WEEK THE BENCH RUNS OUT
This is the part no diary can do.

A plug in a 288-tray takes about 5.5 cm². The same plant in a 9 cm pot takes 81 cm² — twenty times the space, on one morning. Sum that across every batch alive in a given week and the tightest week of the year is almost never the one you would guess.

• The whole year charted against YOUR bench and frame area, with a capacity line across it
• Every week that breaks it, listed, with what is standing on the bench in the worst one
• Pots are square-packed, not circle-packed: a 9 cm pot is 81 cm², not 64. Using circle area under-reports the bench by a fifth and is the commonest way a space plan comes out optimistic

A WORKLIST, NOT A CALENDAR
• Sow, prick out, pot on, harden off, ship — dated, banded by when, and carrying the plant and tray counts that decide whether a job is an hour or a morning
• Overdue work sits in its own band, because "what is late" is a different question from "what is this week"
• Tick jobs off in any order, which is what actually happens on a wet Tuesday

KEEP IT ORGANISED
• One search across crops and batches
• Filter by stage, sort by sow date, ready date, size or crop
• Multi-select to archive together; undo any delete
• Pin the batch that cannot slip

YOUR DATA, YOURS
• CSV with the derived sow dates, seed counts and survival rates included
• A printable space plan for the potting shed wall
• Full JSON backup and restore. Nothing is locked in

BUILT FOR A POTTING SHED
Warm, high-contrast, generous touch targets, and monospaced figures that line up down a column. Every verdict carries an icon and a word as well as a colour — this app is green all over, so a green number alone would say nothing.

100% OFFLINE. NO ACCOUNT. NO TRACKING.
Everything stays on your device. There is no sign-up, no server and no analytics. The app declares exactly one permission — INTERNET — used solely to open our privacy policy page from Settings. Our Play Data safety declaration is "no data collected, no data shared", and it is accurate.

Cold Frame plans from the rates you enter. Your own records beat any figure on a packet.

Free. No ads. No in-app purchases.