We are a small company from Hohenlohe and we build grove, the bed planner for vegetable gardens. With grove you plan your beds in companion planting: good neighbours, crop rotation and the tasks that come up through the year. For everyone who grows vegetables, from a first raised bed to a self-sufficient garden.
The company
Behind grove stands Looking4Cache UG (haftungsbeschränkt), based in Bretzfeld in Baden-Württemberg. We work independently, without investors and without ads. grove pays for itself through memberships alone.
The name Looking4Cache has been around since the company was founded in 2012. It has nothing to do with looking for money, but with geocaching: Thorsten’s first app was a geocaching app, and the company was founded to put it on a proper legal footing. Several more apps have followed since, all of them born out of our own needs and our own curiosity. They have one thing in common: they are always about making life, and with it the world around us, a little better. That sounds grand, but a certain idealism runs through all of it.
Servers and data are in Germany. We try to stay as independent as we can and to source as much as possible from within the EU.
Our story
Thorsten tells how grove came about.
grove is a labour of love, born out of real gardening practice and a lot of passion for organic growing.
In the summer of 2018 we, Claudia and Thorsten, finished terracing our garden. That gave us more room for vegetable beds, a greenhouse and a garden to graze from.
When we drew up our planting plans for companion planting the following winter, it quickly became clear how much work such planning is. The idea for a digital bed planner was born.
Claudia, a landscape gardener with a huge heart for the garden, brought her knowledge and her love of plants into the project. In 2020 we were hit by a blow of fate: cancer. grove lay still at first, but as time went on Claudia worked a great deal on the plant database from her hospital bed.
After Claudia’s death in 2022, grove lay untouched for almost three years. As a single father of two children I did not have the strength to carry the project on. Since 2024 I have had Anja at my side, a new partner who supports me and helps me finish grove. At the end of 2025 I released the first version of grove.
Contact
Write to us at [email protected].
More about grove
- Where the name grove comes from: What is grove.eco
- How grove is developing: Version history