One thing to say upfront: the harvest preview is not an exact science. It won’t tell you to the day when you’ll pull your first carrot – or how long the chard will keep coming. How much grows and how fast depends on so many things: sunshine, rain, soil, microclimate… And the difference between Cornwall and Yorkshire isn’t just the accent.

What the harvest preview does really well, though: it shows you where there are still gaps in your growing year – periods when little or nothing from your bed ends up on the plate. In your first year especially, you might be surprised to find that from late autumn onwards, things can get pretty bare.

And that’s exactly where the preview helps.

It gives you a rough overview of when you can expect a harvest of which plant – based on your current bed plan. And it helps you optimise that plan:

Perhaps with late cabbage varieties, with squash, or with sturdy root and tuber vegetables that still bring joy in winter.

Here’s how it works:

Grove looks at when a plant goes into the bed – the planting date or sowing date.
From that point it calculates roughly when the first harvest can be expected.
The plant is shown for as long as it’s in the bed according to your plan – right up to the last month of its growing period.

For crops with long harvest windows in particular, this gives you a good feel for how your self-sufficiency spreads across the year.

The harvest preview isn’t meant for ticking off – it’s there for thinking and planning. So that next year you can still harvest something from your garden in December.