Plant collections grow sideways. A cutting roots, a friend splits a pothos, something follows you home from a garden center, and the count goes from nine to thirty without a decision ever being made. Somewhere in there the watering stops being something you remember and starts being something you guess at — and the guessing is what kills plants, far more often than neglect does.
This is a workbook for the collection at that size. One row per plant, eleven connected tabs, and a hundred species already researched so that adding a plant is three fields rather than eleven.
Pick the species, and the row fills itself in
Type a name, choose a species from the dropdown, choose the room it lives in. The workbook fills in the botanical name, the genus, the light it wants, the humidity it likes, the potting mix it prefers and whether it is safe around a pet — and picks up three intervals to compute with: how often to water it in summer, how often in winter, and how often to feed it.
Every one of those numbers is a starting point you can overwrite. Type your own figure in Summer days, Winter days or Feed every and that plant follows yours instead. Leave it blank and it follows the guide.
Two watering rhythms, not one
This is the idea the whole file is built around. A houseplant does not want water on the same schedule all year: shorter days mean less light, slower growth, and a pot that stays wet for days longer than it did in July. A plant watered on its summer rhythm straight through winter sits in soil it cannot use — which is one of the most common ways an indoor plant dies.
So every plant carries two intervals. The workbook reads today’s month against a growing season you set, picks the right one, and shows the live figure in its own column. You never have to remember which season a plant is on. The season window can wrap the year end, so a southern-hemisphere collection works exactly the same way.
What the next two weeks look like
Plant apps notify you one plant at a time. This one counts the whole collection forward.
The Care Forecast projects every interval fourteen days ahead — and it repeats properly, so a plant on a five-day rhythm shows up three times in a fortnight rather than once. It totals the waterings and feedings due on each day, breaks them down by room, and flags the days that pile up past a threshold you set. The right response to a busy day is not to skip a plant; it is to water one or two of them a day early, and the forecast is what lets you see that coming.
A sitter sheet you can actually print
Set the date you leave. The Sitter Handoff tab lays your plants down the page and seven days across it, and puts a word in a cell only where something needs doing. Filter it to the plants that need anything, and print — it is set up landscape and fitted to the page, with the filter already on.
The blank cells are the useful part. Most plants killed by a house-sitter are killed by kindness, and a sheet that says plainly “nothing on Tuesday” prevents more damage than a list of instructions.
The check nobody else makes
Every plant tracker stores a light requirement, and every one stores a room. This one subtracts them.
Rate each room once against a four-rung ladder, and the Room fit column tells you which plants are somewhere that does not suit them. It reads a range rather than a single number — the dimmest light a species will accept and the brightest it will take — so a snake plant in a bright room is correctly left alone while a fern on a south-facing sill is flagged. Moving one of those plants six feet is usually worth more than any change to how you water.
Cuttings, losses, and what the hobby actually costs
The Propagation Log links every cutting back to the plant it came off, then works out how long it took to root, how often that species takes for you, and the average days it needs — from the dates you already entered. It is only honest if you log the failures too, which is why the tab asks for them.
The Plant Losses tab is the post-mortem: cause, room, season, days survived. The Dashboard ranks those by room and by species, so a room that keeps appearing stops looking like bad luck and starts looking like a light or a draft problem. Alongside it: what the collection cost, what it cost by room and by genus, and what it costs per plant still alive — a figure no plant app will ever show you, because none of them track spend.
What it does not do
It does not look anything up. There is no online lookup, no plant identification from a photo, no weather data, no notifications and no valuation. Every figure it shows is arithmetic on what you typed and on the Species Guide that ships inside the file.
The Species Guide is compiled from general horticultural practice and is a starting point, not a prescription — light, pot size and heating in your own home beat any table, which is why every interval is overridable per plant. Pet information is a general guide to common houseplant toxicity, not veterinary advice; if an animal has eaten something, call a vet. The example collection inside the workbook is invented.
Try the free version first
If you would rather see the idea working before you buy it, the free Houseplant Care Starter Sheet is one tab with the same date math in it — a row per plant, an interval you type once, and a status word that keeps itself current. It arrives pre-filled with twelve plants so there is something to look at, and there is no signup and no email.
What it does not have is the part that makes the paid workbook worth paying for: you type every interval yourself, there is one of them rather than a summer and a winter figure, and nothing projects it forward.
Own it, don’t rent it
No account. No subscription. Room for 200 plants, and nothing that stops working the month you stop paying for something. It opens in Excel, in LibreOffice, and as a native Google Sheet through a one-click copy link — not an import, which mangles exactly the parts that matter in a file this full of formulas.
It is a file, and it is yours.
