Plant watering calendar
Pick your plants, say how they live, and download a calendar file with recurring reminders that imports into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook. Every reminder says check, not water — which is the only honest instruction a schedule can give.
A schedule cannot tell you to water
Light, humidity, pot material, soil mix and how warm you keep the room all affect drying speed more than the calendar does. Two identical plants in the same flat can need water a week apart. So every event this tool writes is a prompt to put a finger in the soil, and the interval is only how often that is worth doing. If the top few centimetres are still damp, close the reminder and let it come round again.
Winter is the part people get wrong
Most houseplants slow right down when light gets short, and keep drinking on a summer schedule only until the roots rot. The winter setting stretches every interval by more than half, which sounds drastic and is roughly what the plants actually want. More houseplants die in January from kindness than in July from neglect.
Terracotta changes the answer
An unglazed terracotta pot breathes, so the soil in it dries appreciably faster than the same soil in plastic or a glazed ceramic. That is why it is a separate control rather than a footnote: swapping pot material moves the interval about as much as moving the plant to a different window.
About the file
The download is a plain .ics written by hand to RFC 5545, with one recurring all-day event per plant and a RRULE carrying the interval. Long lines are folded at 75 octets — counted in bytes, not characters, and never through the middle of a multi-byte character — because that is the detail that makes some calendar clients reject a file outright.
FAQ
Where do the intervals come from?
They are the drought tolerance bands these plants are grouped into — succulents and thick-leaved plants at one end, ferns and calatheas at the other — then adjusted by pot, light and season. They are starting points, not measurements of your flat.
Can I change one plant's interval?
Not in the tool. Import the file and edit the recurrence in your calendar, which is where you will be adjusting it anyway once you have watched a plant for a month.
Will it flood my calendar?
Each plant is one event with a repeat rule, not hundreds of separate entries, so it is easy to delete or mute later.
Does anything leave my browser?
No. The plant table ships with the page and the file is assembled here.
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