Care Reminders¶

Kamerplanter automatically reminds you which plants need water, fertiliser, or other care today — without needing to know cron expressions or workflow templates. A single tap is enough to confirm. The system learns from your care behaviour and adjusts intervals automatically.

Prerequisites¶

At least one plant is created
The plant instance has a care profile assigned (created automatically on first access)

Care Reminders in the Task Area¶

Care reminders do not have their own menu entry — they appear together with your other tasks under Tasks (/aufgaben/queue). Choose Care in the Source filter to see only automatic care reminders.

Cards are sorted by urgency and colour-coded:

Colour	Meaning
Red	Overdue
Orange	Due today
Yellow	Due soon (within the next 1–2 days)

No green state

Recently cared-for plants do not produce a card at all — they only reappear once a reminder is due soon, due today, or overdue. There are therefore only the three urgency levels listed above, no per-plant "all good" indicator.

Confirming Care¶

Every care card offers three actions:

Edit (pencil icon) — opens this plant's care profile.
Done (checkmark icon) — confirms the care. The system records the time and calculates the next appointment.
Later (snooze icon) — postpones the reminder by one day by default, without changing the time of your last confirmation.

Adaptive learning

If you consistently water a plant 8 instead of 7 days after the last confirmation, the system adjusts the interval automatically after 3 consecutive confirmations. The learning effect is limited to ±1 day per step and can change the interval by a maximum of ±30 % relative to the base interval.

The Next Watering Task Is Created Immediately¶

Whenever a confirmation closes an open, due watering task, Kamerplanter creates the next watering task right away. This applies to every route by which you can confirm a watering:

Done on the care card in the task overview
Complete on a watering task's detail page, or the checkmark in the task list
a new entry in the watering log

This requires the Auto-create watering tasks switch to be enabled in the care profile.

Changed behaviour

Up to this version the chain ended here: the follow-up task was not created and only appeared with the nightly planning run. For the rest of that day no open watering task was left in the queue — most noticeably when completing the task straight from the task queue. The care card itself was unaffected, as it follows the timestamp of your last confirmation.

A Confirmation Only Closes Due Care Tasks¶

A confirmation only ever closes a care task that is due today or earlier. A follow-up task already scheduled for a later day stays open and only becomes due on its own date.

Example: watering twice on the same day

You water your Monstera in the morning and confirm the due reminder — Kamerplanter schedules the next watering task for seven days from now. If you top it up in the evening and record that too, the task seven days out is left untouched. Up to this version it was closed along with the confirmation, collapsing the entire care cycle into a single day.

Care Profiles¶

Each plant has a care profile with the care intervals for that specific plant. The profile is automatically generated from the species or botanical family master data and can be adjusted afterwards.

Opening a Care Profile¶

Navigate to Plants > desired plant
Click the Care tab
Click Edit Care Profile

In the edit dialog you enable or disable each reminder type individually (toggle) and adjust its interval with a slider; for watering you additionally choose the watering method, for fertilizing the active months.

Care Style Presets¶

The system knows predefined care styles for typical houseplant groups. Use the Care Style field in the edit dialog to choose one of the following nine presets — the base values apply to summer; in winter the watering interval is multiplied by the winter factor:

Not all succulents are cacti

Cacti (Cactaceae) and succulents like Echeveria or Haworthia belong to different families. The cactus care style applies only to true cacti. Echeveria and Haworthia use succulent. Lithops and other Mesembs (Aizoaceae) require even more specific logic and should be configured with custom.

Water quality

For Calatheas and Orchids the system recommends rainwater or filtered water — these plants are sensitive to lime in tap water (brown leaf tips).

Automatic Reminder Types¶

Kamerplanter generates reminders for the following six care tasks:

Reminder Type	Trigger
Watering	Interval since last confirmation, seasonally adjusted
Fertilizing	Interval + only within the care style's active months, only if a nutrient plan is assigned
Repotting	Months since last repotting
Pest Check	Fixed interval (varies by care style, default 14 days)
Location Check	Optionally enabled, can be restricted to specific months
Humidity Check	Optionally enabled, fixed interval

Automatically created care tasks start with priority "Medium"; if a reminder is already overdue, the resulting task is created with priority "High".

Why a Reminder Might Not Appear¶

The most common reason for a "missing" reminder is one of the following:

Active watering schedule: If the plant already has an active automatic watering schedule via a planting run, Kamerplanter suppresses additional manual watering and fertilizing reminders for that plant.
Irrigation demand already covered (rain): For outdoor and greenhouse sites with stored GPS coordinates, Kamerplanter calculates the daily irrigation demand from evapotranspiration (ET₀ for short) minus any rain that has already fallen. If the remaining demand for the day is 0, the watering reminder is skipped — regardless of the otherwise calculated interval. See Watering Log: Suggested Watering Volume for details on the calculation.
Nutrient plan requirement: Fertilizing reminders only occur if a nutrient plan is assigned to the plant — regardless of care style.
Dormant phase: If the plant is in a dormant phase (winter dormancy, senescence, hardening-off, acclimatization, repotting recovery), all reminders except pest check are suppressed.
Active months: If the current month is outside the care style's active months (e.g. November–February for most houseplants), no fertilizing reminder is generated.
On/off toggles: Each reminder type can be individually disabled in the care profile.

Why no fertiliser in winter?

With reduced light in winter, the photosynthesis rate drops. Houseplants cannot absorb nutrients — fertiliser accumulates as salt in the substrate and damages the roots.

Seasonal Adjustment¶

The system automatically adjusts watering intervals to the season:

Northern hemisphere: Winter = December–February
Southern hemisphere: Winter = June–August

The effective watering interval during winter months is calculated as:

Effective interval = base interval × winter factor

Example: Monstera in winter

Base interval (summer): 7 days
Winter factor (tropical): 1.5×
Effective interval (winter): 10–11 days

Overwintering Management¶

For outdoor, greenhouse, and balcony plants, Kamerplanter automatically creates an overwintering plan as soon as they are assigned to such a site — including a winter-hardiness traffic light, a protection measure, and a dedicated care plan during winter dormancy. You don't need to create a profile for this.

Season Automation explains how Kamerplanter detects when winter begins and ends.
Overwintering shows you the automatically created plan per plant and how to adjust it if needed.

Outdoor Care Styles¶

In addition to the nine houseplant styles, the data model knows ten outdoor presets:

Selectable only via the API

These ten outdoor presets are currently not available in the "Care Style" selector of the care profile dialog — the UI only offers the nine houseplant styles from the table above. Of these outdoor styles, automatic family-based assignment (see below) only assigns outdoor_annual_ornamental (for ornamental families such as violets, primroses, or geraniums); the other nine outdoor presets can only be set via the technical API.

Family-Based Care Assignment¶

The system knows the care requirements of 15 plant families and automatically assigns new plants to the matching care style:

For all unlisted families the fallback style tropical applies, unless a species-specific watering guide is available.

Automatic assignment

When you create a new plant instance, the system automatically assigns the matching care style based on the botanical family. You can override the style manually at any time.

Frequently Asked Questions¶

The reminder appears too late — can I adjust this?

Yes. Open the plant's care profile and reduce the interval using the slider. Alternatively, the system will recognise the pattern after a few confirmations and adjust the interval automatically.

I forgot to water a plant — how do I reset the counter?

Confirm the care manually via Done in the task overview (Source "Care"). The system resets the time to "now", regardless of when the last confirmation was.

Why am I not getting a fertilising reminder for my Monstera in December?

That is correct — Monstera (tropical) has an active fertilising period of March–September. In December this period has ended, as houseplants cannot absorb nutrients in winter with reduced light.

What is the difference between \"Later\" and \"Skip\"?

"Later" (snooze) postpones a care reminder by one day without changing the time of your last confirmation — the reminder reappears the next day. There is currently no "Skip" action for care reminders like there is for regular tasks; use "Later" instead, or confirm the care as usual.