About
Why I built Canopy AI
I’m Danney. I garden about 10,000 square feet in central Minnesota, zone 4b, and I’m the one person building Canopy AI.
It started with a spreadsheet. For years I kept my garden in one: version after version of notes, pictures and start dates. Then I’d forget to save. A hard drive would fail. I’d change computers, or an update would break something, and a season of notes was gone.
Notebooks and other garden apps helped, but none answered the questions I actually had. When did I start that planting? How did it do? Why did I start it earlier than the charts everyone uses? What happens to all of it when I get a new phone? I wanted one place for spacing, seed-start dates, where things went, what worked and what didn’t, and a real drawing of the garden. And I wanted to look back at it years later and learn from it.
Gardening gave me my health back. I gardened as a kid with my family, then mostly stopped. When my health needed a change, I went back for the food and the movement. Today my health is 100% and I feel great, and I give most of the credit to eating well and working a big garden. My family and I grow everything, and every year we try something new, vegetables we have never even eaten.
Our season is short. We plan early and start seeds indoors, because a week either way decides the harvest. That is why Canopy dates your plan from your own frost dates, not a zone average.
I’m a controls engineer by trade. My whole career has been designing and programming electrical controls for industrial machines and processes. You measure, compare against where it should be, and adjust. That is how I’m wired, and it is how Canopy works. It re-plans watering around the rain that actually fell, works out fertigation doses, and shows how and why the weather is affecting your plants. You still run your own valves; Canopy does the thinking. My standard for it is the one I hold at work: solid engineering.
The name comes from the same view. Everything from the sun above to the soil below shapes a garden, and Canopy is meant to cover all of it.
Solo, and just getting started. I had the idea four years ago and have worked on it ever since. I’m one person, and I build Canopy with AI as my coding partner. It is in a closed test on Android now, because Android is what I use. Desktop and iPhone versions are in the works and will ship when they’re ready.
Every gardener has failures every year, me included. Writing things down and diagnosing what went wrong is how we learn, from our own mistakes and from Mother Nature’s.
Why there is a free version. I want Canopy to get people over the learning curve faster than I got over it. The free version is my way of giving back; helping someone is its own reward. There are no ads cluttering a learning tool. Free users cost me something to run, and Pro is what pays for them.
What I need from you. I don’t want to grade my own paper. You are the ones who can tell me what Canopy gets right and what it gets wrong: what confused you, what is missing, which dates look off for your area, what you wish it did. I will read every message and answer every one.
Success, to me, is simple: gardeners telling me it helped, features in the app because someone asked for them, and your success stories.
Send feedback to support@getcanopyai.com, or join the test at getcanopyai.com/test.
— Danney