About
Where your lawn advice comes from.
YardLedger is a lawn-care record that gives advice. You log what you do to your yard — every mow, feeding, spray, and soil test — and it turns that history, your grass type, and your local weather into a schedule for what comes next. This page explains who builds it, where the underlying data comes from, and what the software will and won't do on its own.
Why I built YardLedger
Kellen Butler
Founder of YardLedger
I couldn't remember when I'd last fertilized, so I started a spreadsheet. Then a soil test gave me more numbers than answers. The information was there—but it was scattered, and none of it made the next step clear.
I built YardLedger to keep your yard, its history, and its plan together—so you know what you've done, what matters now, and what comes next. It started as the tool I needed for my own lawn—and I still use it today.
How your schedule comes together
- Your yard, specifically. Grass type, sun exposure, irrigation, and mowing height are held per zone, so two zones on the same lot get different guidance when they're genuinely different. Hardiness zone and soil are resolved once for the property.
- Turf-science timing. Feeding windows, pre-emergent timing, mowing heights, and nitrogen rates follow established turf-care and cooperative-extension practice for your grass and region, rather than a fixed national calendar.
- Real weather, continuously. Recent rainfall, the forecast, and accumulated growing-degree days drive your watering target, your alerts, and your PGR and mowing reminders — so what you're told to do this week tracks the season you're actually having, not an average one.
- Your own record. What you log feeds back in — the assistant reads your history, and your watering and reapplication timing account for what you have already done — so guidance narrows over time instead of restarting from zero each season.
The data behind it
These are the upstream sources YardLedger actually calls. They're listed so the claim that your schedule uses real local data is something you can go and check.
- NOAA National Weather Service
Forecast and observed temperature and rainfall for US locations, overlaid on the Open-Meteo forecast for the days it covers — the quantitative basis for frost warnings and spray-window alerts on forecast days, and the measured rainfall credited to the watering balance on completed past days.
- Open-Meteo
The base historical and forecast weather worldwide, including the evapotranspiration, soil-temperature and UV series NWS does not publish — evapotranspiration is what drives the watering engine's water balance.
- phzmapi.org
Resolving your ZIP code to a USDA plant hardiness zone. The zone is an adaptation check — which grasses survive your winter — and a coarse index into representative freeze normals; task timing is refined from those freeze normals, the local forecast, and your own care history. Serves data from the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map.
- USDA Soil Data Access (SSURGO)
A regional soil-map estimate of texture at your property's coordinates, used to set a starting watering depth and frequency. SSURGO is planning-scale map-unit data, so grading, fill and compaction on a built lot can make it a poor match — you can override it with what you actually dig up.
What the AI does — and doesn't
- The Yard Assistant proposes; you decide. Nothing it suggests is added to your schedule until you approve it.
- It explains the reasoning behind a plan, and it can tell you which parts of your history it drew on if you ask. Short factual answers are kept short rather than padded with rationale.
- It works to established agronomic guardrails — a per-application nitrogen guardrail, and grass-specific annual budgets rather than a one-size-fits-all number — and a plan that schedules a feeding inside an earlier product's release window gets flagged for your review before you accept it. Those are agronomy, not law: your state or county fertilizer rules can set a lower per-application rate, cap the soluble (quick-release) fraction separately, or black out a season entirely, and they and the product label are what actually govern the rate you may apply.
- It does not replace the product label. Whatever you're applying, the label is the legal and authoritative instruction, and the assistant will keep telling you so.
- It is not a substitute for a soil test, a licensed applicator, or your local extension office when something is genuinely wrong.
Your data
Your yard history is yours. You can delete your account at any time, from the app or from this page, and the free plan never asks for a card. Your yard data is removed from our systems immediately; a few things outlive it for documented reasons — encrypted backups rotate out within 90 days, payment processors keep the transaction records they're required to keep, and support conversations are removed on request. That page lists all of them, and what we collect and why is in the privacy policy.
YardLedger is operated by Butler Technology Concepts, LLC. Questions, corrections, and disagreements about our agronomy are all welcome at our contact page.
See it on your own lawn.
The schedule generator is free and needs no account — pick your grass type and look at what it gives you.