About

Built for homesteaders, not subscribers.

The Homestead Plan is a planning tool for people who want to feed their families from the garden, not a SaaS product designed to keep you paying every month. We built it because the existing options had it backwards.

The problem we kept hitting

The garden-planning market has two failure modes. The good tools (GrowVeg, the Old Farmer's Almanac Garden Planner, Seedtime) are all subscriptions. You stop paying, you lose access to the plan you already built. Your bed layouts vanish. Your succession schedule disappears. The thing you spent two evenings on becomes a screenshot.

The free tools, on the other hand, are single-purpose. A soil-volume calculator that doesn't know about spacing. A spacing chart with no frost-date logic. A companion-planting wheel from 1976 that lists folklore alongside actual allelopathy research. None of them join up.

We wanted one comprehensive planner that connects family size to crop choice to bed layout to planting dates to actual self-sufficiency percentage, at a one-time price that respects the user.

Where the numbers come from

Every yield estimate, spacing rule, frost-date, and companion relationship in The Homestead Plan is sourced from published extension-service data, peer-reviewed agronomy research, or widely accepted home-gardening references. The data file lives in version control. Nothing in the tool is an LLM hallucination dressed up as a number.

Where yields are reported as ranges, we use the conservative end for the self-sufficiency calculator (so you don't under-plant) and the midpoint for cost-savings projections (so you don't overstate ROI). Where companion-planting claims are folklore-only with no mechanism, we leave them out. Where two extensions disagree, we cite the one whose climate is closest to the median user.

What this tool actually does

The Homestead Plan answers the practical questions a homesteader asks at the seed rack:

• How much should I plant? Plug in your family, what you eat, and your goal (fresh, some preserving, or full-year self-sufficiency). Get plant counts, square footage, and an estimated yield per crop.
• How much soil do I need? Multiple bed shapes (rectangle, circle, L-shape), multiple beds, settling buffer, soil-mix percentages, bag estimates, and cost in your currency.
• What grows together? 230 pairwise relationships across 82 crops, with a short evidence-based note on every entry.
• When do I plant what? USDA zones 3–11 with frost dates pre-loaded, or enter your own. Hemisphere toggle for southern-hemisphere users.
• What does the whole year look like? The paid Growing Plan tab generates a personalised month-by-month schedule using your inputs: bed layouts, succession timing, harvest windows, preservation jars, the savings number. A downloadable HTML report you can print or save as PDF.

Who Urban Root is

Urban Root is a small independent operation building practical tools for people who grow food, raise stock, and want to do it without paying a subscription for the privilege. The Homestead Plan is our flagship product, sitting alongside a small family of related tools: an aeroponics calculator for soilless growers, a grow-room environment calculator, and a famine-preparedness tool for people thinking longer-term about food security.

We build, we ship, we read every email. There is no growth team, no investor deck, no enterprise tier. Just a planner that does what it says, sold once.

Our principles

Pay once. Use forever.

Every Urban Root product is a one-time purchase. You buy it, you own the licence, your data lives on your device. If we shut down tomorrow, your last-downloaded plan still opens in your browser and prints to PDF.

Data over vibes.

The Self-Sufficiency calculator treats USDA's 300-lb-per-person-per-year figure as a default, not a magic number. Every yield you see is traceable. If the number surprises you, the source is in our database.

No account drama.

No signup. No email verification. No password reset cycle. You buy the paid tier, you get a licence key, you paste it in. Three devices, never expires.

Honest about limits.

We don't claim the tool will make you self-sufficient if you have 200 sq ft. We don't promise specific yields. The plan is a planning aid, not an agronomic guarantee. Your soil, your weather, your management (and a bit of luck) still matter more than any spreadsheet.

The roadmap

The Homestead Plan is live and complete for its v1 scope. The current backlog: a property-layout overlay for the soil tab (drag bed rectangles onto a satellite image of your land), a deeper preservation-planner with regional canning altitude adjustments, and a multi-year crop-rotation engine for serious homesteaders running 4-year rotations.

We do not announce dates. Things ship when they're ready.

Get in touch

If you want to suggest a feature, report a bug, ask about a regional crop we missed, or just tell us what you're growing this year, contact us. The address goes to a real inbox. We read everything.