Stewardship
Native · Invasive · Organic
Gardens are bigger than gardens.
Your patch of earth does more good than it gets credit for.
Free for your first growing season. No credit card.
Why it matters
Hundreds of millions of households around the world have a home garden. That is a lot of beds doing a lot of good — more than just the cucumbers and the zinnias and the turnips you grew despite hating turnips.
When that many gardeners are making decisions about what to plant, what to spray, and what to pull, the tools they trust to help guide those decisions have a responsibility to get it right.
That’s why Percy is built around ecological stewardship. Ask it for advice or to ID something in your garden, and Percy celebrates the natives, flags invasives and tells you how to get rid of them, and suggests organic options first when something’s eating your plants.
The bees don’t have a lobbyist, and somebody has to think about them.
01Identifies natives
Percy supports native plants.
Native plants are vital homes, host plants, and food sources for local wildlife. So when you ask about a patch of “weeds” and it turns out to be an important native plant, Percy calls it out and makes you feel like a hero for having it in your yard.
02Supports wildlife
Percy helps you know the friends from the foes.
When you ask whether to spray a bug, Percy recognizes a beneficial insect and tells you to hold off. Some of them are on your side.
03Alerts to invasives
Percy helps you fight the invasives.
Some plants, including some sold as ornamentals at nurseries, are dangerous invasives that are doing real damage to the environment. Percy identifies invasive plants and helps you know how to get rid of them.
Fighting invasives is the good fight. Percy is built to cheer it on.
04Knows your region
Percy is region-correct, or it’s quiet.
Percy will tell a gardener in New York that the Canada goldenrod they took for a weed is one of the most valuable plants they could grow. It would tell a gardener in London the opposite, because there, Canada goldenrod is an aggressive invasive.
Percy tells you whether a plant is invasive where you garden, and celebrates the natives. Its ecology advice is grounded in trustworthy government sources: the USDA in the US, DEFRA in the UK, and their national counterparts in Canada and Australia, the four regions where Percy currently has confident data. In the US, that includes the federal noxious weed list and your own state’s noxious-weed list, plus its invasive-plant list for the states Percy has loaded so far.
If it can’t be confident about your regional ecosystem, it says nothing. Being confidently wrong about your corner of the world is worse than staying quiet. A plant that is native in one place can be invasive in another.
Why it works
Stewardship that feels like delight
The path to taking care of the world around us runs straight through your tomato garden. Percy just helps you notice.Brian Eden, who built Percy
Think back over those four: a coneflower, a caterpillar, a weed, a goldenrod. None of them arrived labeled ecology. They arrived labeled wonder, inside a conversation you were already having about something you already love. The awareness builds one observation at a time.
Stewardship sticks when it feels like delight.
There’s a longer story behind all this: Accidental Stewardship →
05Gives back 1%
A garden should give something back.
Percy is a member of 1% for the Planet, a standing pledge to give 1% of our annual sales to organizations working to make gardens better for the living things around them. We’re starting with two.
Homegrown National Park
Homegrown National Park believes what we believe: that an ordinary gardener, planting natives and pulling invasives in an ordinary yard, is one of the most powerful forces for biodiversity we have. Millions of small patches, stitched together, add up to something the size of a national park. That’s the future Percy is built for.
The Wildlife Trusts
The Wildlife Trusts are building a Nature Recovery Network, rooted in the conviction that gardens, parks, verges, reserves and rivers, connected across a whole country, let wildlife move, feed and breed again. It’s the same belief from the other side of the Atlantic: a single garden matters most when it’s part of something larger. That’s the world Percy is trying to help gardeners build, one patch at a time.
The AI part
An honest word about the AI part.
Percy is an AI garden journal, and I know that sits a little uneasily next to a page about caring for the environment. AI has a significant energy cost.
Here’s the bet I’m making. Used in service of making gardeners more attentive to their patch of the world (more likely to leave the leaves for the caterpillars, to skip the spray, to discover their backyard is part of something larger), I think this produces far more good than the energy it costs.
And the cost is genuinely small: Percy is built to use small, efficient models for the everyday work, and saves the larger ones for photo ID and your once-a-year report. A full season of use runs about the energy of leaving a single LED bulb on for the day. One round trip to the garden center in an average car produces more than a hundred times more carbon than Percy does for a user in a whole season.
Whether the bet pays off is a fair question, and honestly not one anyone can measure. The cost is measurable, so I’ve kept it small and published the whole methodology: where the numbers come from and where they could be wrong.
Enjoy your garden. Percy remembers it.
Free for your first growing season. Then $39/year as a Founding Member, locked in for as long as you stay subscribed. The price will rise as Percy grows. Yours won't. No credit card required. Your data is yours regardless.
