Jenna Deane, co-founder of the community-oriented gardening app GeoGardenClub, is passionate about local food sustainability.
After graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in environmental education, Deane ran a school garden program in California for seven years. She also helped to manage 24 school gardens with Common Threads, a Bellingham-based non-profit that connects kids with healthy foods, for three years.
The idea for GeoGardenClub came to Deane amid COVID, in the winter of 2021. During the dark January days, Deane would spend hours working through her home gardening planning spreadsheets, feeling like there had to be a better and more efficient way to organize home garden beds.
Photograph courtesy of GeoGardenClub
The solution she came to: GeoGardenClub. There were a couple of key features she felt were missing from other gardening apps that she wanted to make core elements of GeoGardenClub.
First, she knew she wanted the gardening communities to be as local as possible; she and her co-founder, Philip Johnson, who was responsible for the software development of the app, made this possible by splitting national areas into chapters. Gardening chapters currently exist in Whatcom County, Philadelphia, Michigan, Manhattan, and more. Chapter members can join or create new gardening beds and input data about when they planted a crop, when its harvesting season is, and when its seeding season is. Gardeners also have access to community data, helping to create a hyperlocal database of gardening information.
They also put a large importance on multi-year garden retention, helping to track trends throughout time and optimize and adjust the needs of the garden with the changing climate. Deane explains that gardeners are some of the most observant people, and the data that can be collected at the local level can be extremely powerful.
The multi-year data collection has helped Deane make more informed decisions about what to plant when.
“[I know] the timing that I can grow spinach really well in my garden, and I know when it’s too late, so I’m not even going to try. I’m not going to be optimistic. I’m not going to waste my time. I’m not going to waste those seeds. I’m not going to waste space,” Deane says.
Photograph courtesy of GeoGardenClub
Along with trying to localize gardening data, GeoGardenClub also has a goal of increasing community food resilience through community food production. They do this through one of the baseline features of the application, the sharing sections. This is where gardeners can share extra seeds they may have harvested, as well as pots, tools, and anything else they think other gardeners may be able to use.
The app officially launched to the public in January 2025, after a Whatcom-County-only beta run in 2024. The Whatcom County Chapter currently has 85 members and 329 “plantings,” a term used to refer to a single data entry for a plant or group of plants of the same variety, planted on the same day.
GeoGardenClub is a subscription-based app that costs users $5 per month. Deane says they are advertisement-free, which means all revenue comes from subscriptions. They are currently offering a six-month free trial for those who may be curious about the app.
Bellingham, geogardenclub.com
