How to Manage Your Seeds and Bulbs with GrowMuir

Buying seeds and bulbs in one visit and sowing them over the next six months is normal gardening — but it's also how packets end up forgotten at the back of a drawer past their best. GrowMuir's seed and bulb inventory keeps track of what you've got, when to sow or plant it, and whether it's still worth using.

Adding a seed or bulb

From your garden's Inventory section, tap Add seed or Add bulb. You've got two ways to fill it in:

• Search the catalogue — start typing the crop or variety (e.g. "Tomato 'San Marzano'") and pick it from the list. This pulls in a reference photo automatically.
• Scan the packet — photograph it instead of typing. Take a photo of the front first; GrowMuir reads the name and variety straight off it with AI.

If the front photo already has everything printed on it — sowing window, germination time, sow-by date — that's all pulled in and you're done. Most packets keep the detailed instructions on the back, though, so if the front didn't show them you'll be asked for a second photo of the back. Nothing is guessed: anything not clearly printed is left blank rather than invented, so it's always worth a quick check over the filled-in fields before saving.

Tracking a sow-by date

Seed and bulb packets often carry a "sow by", "use by" or "best before" date — after that, germination isn't guaranteed. This is different from the sowing window (e.g. "sow April–July"), which is a season that comes round every year; the sow-by date is a one-off expiry for that specific packet.

! Enter this whenever you know it, even for items you add by hand rather than by scanning — it's what the expiry alert below depends on.

Getting an alert before it's too late

GrowMuir doesn't just remind you a fixed number of days before a sow-by date — it works out when your last realistic sowing window actually is. If a packet is sown April to July and its sow-by date falls within 2028, that last window opens the following April, so the nudge to use it or lose it arrives a month earlier, in March 2028.

When that alert fires, three things happen together:

• A notification appears in GrowMuir (and a push notification, if you've enabled them).
• A task is added to your garden to-do list, so it sits alongside everything else due that week.
• The packet itself gets a badge in your inventory — amber for "sow soon", red once the sow-by date has actually passed.

Marking something as grown

Once you've sown or planted an item, open it and use I've planted this to log it against a garden. That links the packet to a real plant in your garden, starts a care schedule for it, and — combined with the sow-by tracking above — turns "I bought seeds" into an outcome you can actually see, rather than a stock count that never changes.