CannaPal automatically turns the dates you record into a clear, at-a-glance picture of where each plant is in its life. Understanding how it counts will help the progress labels make sense.
The week, stage, and day model
On the dashboard and on each plant, you’ll see a progress line that reads something like:
Week 2 · Vegetative · Day 9
Here’s how CannaPal works that out:
- The clock starts at sprout. When your plant sprouts, that’s Day 1. (If you haven’t recorded a sprout date yet, CannaPal counts from your start date as a fallback.)
- The first week is Seedling. Days 1 through 7 read as the Seedling stage, Week 1.
- Vegetative begins automatically on day 8. From Day 8 onward, the label moves to Vegetative and Week 2, then Week 3, and so on — you don’t have to manually flip the stage for this to show correctly. It’s a display calculation; your saved stage isn’t overwritten behind your back.
Setting the sprout date
Because the whole cycle is anchored on sprouting, recording an accurate sprout date matters. When you move a plant from Germinating to Seedling, CannaPal treats that as the sprout and records the date — that’s what starts the Day 1 count. Moving from Seedling to Vegetative does not change your sprout date; it’s just a later milestone with no date of its own.
Flowering resets the count
When a plant enters flower, the day counter resets. Flowering Day 1 is the day you flipped to flower (or set the flower date). So once a plant is flowering, the label reads:
Week 1 · Flowering · Day 1
This is intentional — when you’re flowering, what you care about is how many days into flower you are, not how many days since sprout. To keep the earlier information handy, CannaPal also stamps the total time the plant spent in veg, shown alongside the flowering label as something like (60d veg). That veg length is simply the time between your sprout date and your flower date.
Harvest and finishing
When a plant is harvested and marked successful (or failed), CannaPal records the total cycle length and the plant moves into your completed records. Finished plants stop showing a running day count and instead show how long the full cycle took — useful data for comparing runs.
Why the dates matter
All of this only works as well as the dates you give it. You don’t need to be obsessive, but recording sprout, flower, and harvest dates as they happen is what lets CannaPal show accurate progress and build meaningful history across grows.
Where to go next
To see your space laid out visually, the Garden Views & Canopy Map guide covers how to organize plants by location and plan your canopy.