Records instead of memory
By February you can't remember which cucumbers made the crisp pickles, how many jars of salsa are left, or whether last year's batch needed the extra jalapeño. Seed & Shelf keeps track while you work, so next season you're reading notes rather than guessing.
What it keeps track of
- Recipes you write yourself — ingredient lines with ranges and per-jar amounts, and named steps in the order you actually work.
- Batches you made: jars produced, jar size, prep, a rating and notes on how it turned out.
- Where the produce came from — variety by variety, garden bed or market, with harvest dates. One ingredient can draw on several sources, because it usually does.
- Heat, worked out from the ingredients and overridable once you've tasted it. Both numbers are kept, because the gap between them is worth knowing.
- Put-up days, grouping every batch from one session in one place.
- Jars remaining, counted down as you open, use and give them away.
What it does not do
Seed & Shelf supplies no recipes, processing times, altitude adjustments or canning instructions. You enter your own, and the app stores them exactly as you typed them — it never checks, corrects or suggests.
That's deliberate. Canning safety deserves a tested, current source, and this is a logbook rather than a guide. Keep following whichever source you trust.
Your records stay yours
Everything lives on your phone in a database only the app can read. There's no account, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded anywhere — the app works with no signal at all, which matters when the shelves are in a cellar.
You can export the whole logbook as a file whenever you like, and print a recipe, a batch record or an inventory of what's on the shelf. If you run your own server you can point the app at it and keep off-device backups there. Nothing leaves the phone unless you send it.
Read the privacy policy — it's short, because there isn't much to say.
Getting the App
Seed & Shelf is being built and used through a real canning season before it goes to the Play Store — a preserving app that hasn't survived an August isn't finished.
Until then it's free, and installs directly on any Android phone. Because it comes from outside the Play Store, Android shows a couple of warnings on the way in — the download page walks through each one.
Where the name comes from
Built on a family farm, for a shelf that had outgrown memory. The garden side is coming: beds and plantings feeding the varieties you pick when logging a batch, closing the loop from seed to shelf.