Water Your Plants (Microsoft Power Apps)

Water Your Plants is an app I created that reminds me to check my plants for watering.

Key features:

• Average of recent watering intervals
• Next Watering date, as well as a Days Left countdown
• Visual cue on cards when waterings are due

I developed Water Your Plants with Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Lists.

Previous progress is compiled below. Their original posts can be tracked via the Water Your Plants tag.

from: Projects and Updates, 2021Q1
Remember To Water Your Plants
There are 21 plants in my home. 5 plants is probably when I began using a basic app to track waterings. Now that I'm at 21, I'm longing for three more features I don't currently have.

• Last Watered and Next Watering dates (vs. only having a countdown clock).
• The ability to edit the Last Watered date in case I forget to track a watering.
• Average time between waterings.

While I could look for a better app, or keep a spreadsheet, where's the fun in that? Unsurprisingly, I'm building a little something from scratch.

Quick interface sketches

I've decided to use Microsoft Power Apps. I haven't gotten too far, yet, but I think it'll work fairly well.

Interface in Power Apps

The most helpful Power Apps doc I've read so far is "Understand canvas-app variables in Power Apps", which specifically notes Power Apps works more like Excel than JavaScript. Having that called out explicitly was really valuable.

from: Projects and Updates, 2021Q3
Remembering To Water My Plants
Last I checked in, I was at the beginning of building a plant watering app, and I was hopeful Microsoft Power Apps would do the job well. Now it's now, and I've been using Power Apps to help me water my plants for about ten weeks.

1, 3, and 6 month averages, since humidity changes shift watering needs throughout the year

Some highlights:

• I tried using collections for data storage and I couldn't solve how to make the data permanent and retrievable. Linking forms to SharePoint lists was a better solution for me.

• Initially, I only included a Next Watering date. I often don't know the current date, though, so a Next Watering date wasn't all that helpful. I added a Days Left field (calculated at run time) to help with that.

• In theory, the app should display plant pictures and I'm not sure why it doesn't. Since these are my plants I'm fairly accurate with names alone, but the images would be nice to have.

The pictures are missing when viewed via the Power Apps Android app (inset left), but not when viewed online (right).

from: Projects and Updates, 2023Q2
Remembering To Water Your Plants

It's been a couple of years since I wrote about creating my own Power App to track watering my plants.

Well, I broke it recently. I renamed a SharePoint group and everything went all 💣💥.

The app's data is stored in two Lists^[1], and it seems Lists are associated with SharePoint groups but aren't actually in SharePoint groups. In any event, I renamed a SharePoint group and the Lists were abandoned to the digital aether.

After recreating the Lists, Power Apps wouldn't connect the old interface to the new data, so I also recreated the necessary interfaces from scratch to generate brand new connections.

For the record, the new Lists are now associated with their own, dedicated SharePoint group that will not be renamed. 😅

from: Projects and Updates, 2023Q4
Remembering To Water My Plants

I made some quick, clutch updates to my plant watering Power App.

One
The plants are now sorted to mimic the path I take to water them.

Two
I added visual cues when plants are due for a watering. Here's the formula I used in Power Apps to make it happen:

If(ThisItem.NextWatering-Today() = 0, RGBA(195, 255, 255, 1), ThisItem.NextWatering-Today() < 0, RGBA(59,201,255,1), RGBA(255,255,255,1))

from: Oct 2024 Water Your Plants Update

Two quick updates I made to my app.

One
The day before plants are due to be watered, the days left indicator turns green. When I'm concerned about underwatering plants, this serves as a good reminder to check on them.

Two
I added a refresh button.

from: Aug 2025 Water Your Plants Update

Recently, I planted a wave of cuttings into soil. Now that I have lots more plants (and they all look identical) locating specific ones has become more challenging.

So many pothos

For a day or two, I considered creating a new data field that would let the app create some visual distinction for the different zones of my home where the plants live. Luckily, I landed on a simpler solution: adding a letter to the beginning of each name to mark their location.

It's basic, it was orders of magnitude faster than having the app render something visual, and it's wildly effective -- now I can spot and find my plants much faster, no matter where they're tucked away.