Mebuki

See exactly how to care for your plants. Mebuki is a free iPhone app of short animated plant care guides for small homes, windowsills and balconies, with advice for your local weather. Instead of reading about "indirect light" or "well-draining soil", you watch exactly how to water, repot and fix each plant.

The guides are written in the open, so any grower can suggest a tip or add a plant.

Mebuki is Japanese for "sprouting", a plant coming into leaf.

How a guide grows

Priya kept killing basil on her kitchen windowsill. One evening she found the fix in a university extension leaflet: water the soil in the morning, pinch the flower spikes, keep it above 10°C. She opened a pull request that edited one file, content/guides/sweet-basil.json, and added a link to back up every tip.

A stranger in Osaka reviewed it and suggested pinching just above a leaf pair. A retired gardener in Leeds tightened the night temperature and linked the RHS page that said so. The checks went green, the pull request was merged, and the next build of the app shipped a basil guide that three people on two continents had made better.

That is the whole idea. Every guide is one small file anyone can improve, every tip is backed by a real source, and every merge grows the app.

Why Mebuki

Most plant care apps follow the same playbook: snap a photo, then hit a subscription. Their care tips come with no sources, most of them track you, and your plants live in their cloud. Mebuki takes the opposite path.

• Every tip shows its source. Each guide cites at least two trusted references (the RHS, university extension services, the ASPCA for pet safety). The checks will not pass without them.
• Free, with nothing to unlock. No subscription, no trial, no ads.
• Private by default. No account, no tracking, no data collected. Everything works offline on your phone.
• Save your plants, no account needed. Tap the heart to keep a plant close. Your list syncs through your own iCloud, never through us.
• Learn by watching. Each plant's routine plays out step by step, and you can jump to any step.
• Pet safety you can check. Toxicity tags come from the ASPCA, with a pet-safe filter.
• Plants people actually grow. Kitchen herbs, balcony tomatoes and plants like Tulasi sit next to the usual houseplants.
• Fully open source. The guides, the app and its animation engine all live here, and the same guides ship as a free iPhone app.

Add or fix a guide

1. Copy content/template/plant-guide.template.json to content/guides/<plant-id>.json.
2. Fill it in and add your sources.
3. Run npm run validate:guides, then open a pull request.

CONTRIBUTING.md has the details. Not ready to write one? Open an issue to suggest a plant or a correction.

What's next

Ideas we would love help with, roughly in order:

1. Watering reminders that stay on your phone. Free forever, no account, and easy to adjust to your home.
2. My shelf. Saved plants are here; next comes a watering log and notes, kept on the device and in your own iCloud.
3. More plants, from more places. Curry leaf, jasmine, neem and the herbs people grow on balconies from Mumbai to Mexico City.
4. Point and learn. Optional plant recognition that runs on the phone, used only to open the right guide.

Run it

Requires Node 22+.

npm install
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:5173 to browse every guide.

Built with

React and SVG, animated by a small open-source engine in src/motion/. Vite and TypeScript build it, Capacitor turns it into the iPhone app, and GitHub Actions sends each release to TestFlight.