Free tool · for plant people
Houseplant Care Starter Sheet — Free
A collection grows 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 — one plant watered twice in a week, another left bone dry behind a door since spring. This free starter is one spreadsheet tab that turns the guessing into a watering schedule: a row per plant with its species, the room it lives in, how many days you water it, and the date you last did. Off that interval and that date the sheet works out when the plant is next due, how many days that is from today, and a single word for every plant — Overdue, Due today, Due soon, On track, or Add a date while the interval or the last watering is still blank — that tells you where you stand without your having to read a date. Three counts along the top keep themselves current.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- A one-tab plant watering tracker: one row per plant — name, species, room, the watering interval you type once, the date you last watered it, and a notes column.
- Works out Next water, the days until it, and a Status word for every plant, and keeps all three current every time you open the file.
- The status is a WORD, not just a color, so the column reads the same printed in black and white or by anyone who does not see the shading.
- Keeps a live count of the plants you have logged, the ones overdue, and the ones due inside the next week.
- Comes pre-loaded with a twelve-plant fictional collection so you can see it working, then overwrite it with your own.
- Opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice — no macros, no signup, and nothing in the file ever leaves your computer.
- 60 plant rows, one interval per plant that you type in yourself. There is no species guide behind it, nothing switches the interval by season, and nothing projects it forward — those are the paid workbook's job.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Want the file to know the care, instead of you typing it?
This free starter makes you type the interval. The full Houseplant Collection & Care Tracker knows it: pick a species from a curated 100-plant reference and the row fills in the botanical name, the genus, the light it wants, the humidity, the potting mix it prefers and whether it is safe around a pet — then carries TWO watering rhythms for that plant, a summer one and a winter one, and reads today's month to decide which is live. From there it projects every interval fourteen days forward, room by room, and flags the days that pile up; turns the same numbers into a seven-day plant-sitter grid you can filter and print; compares the light each plant wants against the light you rated its room and says Too dark or Too bright; links every cutting back to its mother plant and works out how often that species roots for you and how long it takes; and records what died, where and in which season, so a room that keeps appearing stops looking like bad luck. Eleven connected tabs, a live dashboard, a 100-species reference you can keep by the watering can, three print-and-fill sheets and a one-click Google Sheets copy.
A one-time purchase you keep — the owned workbook between a blank spreadsheet and a rented plant app.
A personal plant-care log, not horticultural or veterinary advice. It does not look anything up: there is no plant identification, no photo lookup, no weather feed, no reminders and no valuation — every figure it shows is arithmetic on the dates and intervals you type in. Watering intervals depend on your own light, pot size and heating, so treat any starting number as a guess to correct rather than a rule. The example collection is illustrative sample data: the species are real plants, but the plants as listed — their names, rooms, dates and notes — are invented. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.