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 — and how each one was processed, because the same recipe gets water-bathed for the pantry one week and fridged the next.
- 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.
A recipe from a page you found
Typing a recipe in from a website is the dullest part of keeping a logbook, so the app can read the page for you. Give it the address of a recipe you already trust and it transcribes the ingredient lines and the steps into a draft — quantities, ranges like “1 to 2 cups”, and the steps in the order they were written.
Nothing is saved until you have read it. The draft appears line by line, and wherever it changed the wording the original is shown underneath, so a wrong reading is obvious rather than plausible. Correct a line there, or throw the whole draft away.
Steps are copied word for word and never reworded. A step that reads “process 15 minutes for pints and 25 minutes for quarts” arrives saying exactly that, because rephrasing a processing time is how an app introduces an error into something that matters. It is still a recipe you chose, from a source you chose — the app is doing your typing, not your thinking.
Some pages can't be read this way — ones behind a login, or built without the structured recipe data the app looks for. Those offer paste-the-text instead.
Labels for the lids
Print labels for a single batch, or for everything from one put-up day. Pick the size, pick what goes on them — the name, the date, a heat rating drawn as little peppers, a QR code — and print a sheet of round labels or one at a time on a label printer.
The QR code is the part that earns its place. Scan it with your phone's camera and the app opens that jar's batch, where you can count it down as you open one or give it away. It works with no signal, because the code carries an identifier rather than a web address — and that identifier survives a backup and restore, so a label stays correct for as long as the jar does.
Already have label software you like? Export the label data as a spreadsheet instead, one row per label, and arrange it there. The app doesn't try to beat a dedicated label program at layout, so it gives you the data to use in one.
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.
What it does not do
Seed & Shelf supplies no recipes, processing times, altitude adjustments or canning instructions. They come from you — typed in, or transcribed from a page you chose — and the app stores them exactly as they arrived. 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.
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.