PatternBase Is Live: Design in Guilds, Learn from Your Bioregion

It's live.

After ninety sessions and more hours than I want to count, PatternBase opened to the public this week. If you've been following the blog or waiting on the signup list, you can now create your account and start documenting what's actually growing.

I want to use this post to tell you what it is, what it costs, and why I built it this way.

The Gap It Fills

Most garden planning tools are built for annual vegetable growers. They'll remind you to water your tomatoes. Some will generate a planting calendar. A few will suggest companion plants from a static list.

None of them were built for how permaculture practitioners actually work: in guilds, layers, zones, and succession timescales that span years. I wrote about this problem more thoroughly in the February post that kicked this whole thing off, but the short version is: we're all guessing. We design food forests from theory diagrams, plant guilds based on books written for someone else's climate, and lose the details by next season.

PatternBase is the tool I wanted to exist. So I built it.

What It Actually Does

Design in guilds, not rows

The visual guild designer is the core of the app. You start with an anchor plant, usually a fruit tree, and build outward, assigning companion plants to functional roles: nitrogen fixer, dynamic accumulator, pollinator attractor, pest repellent, ground cover, mulch maker. A plan view shows the top-down spatial layout. A cross-section view shows vertical layering from canopy to root zone.

A timeline slider lets you move through Year 1, Year 3, Year 5, and maturity, showing how the guild develops as plants establish at different rates. The thing most guild diagrams never show you is the gap between what you plant in spring and what you'll have in five years. The timeline makes that visible.

There are 30 guild templates to start from if you want a tested foundation. The fruit tree guild design guide I wrote last month walks through the design principles in detail if you want to understand the logic before you open the designer.

Learn from your bioregion

A guild that thrives in Zone 7a clay soil might fail completely in Zone 5b sand. Zone number alone doesn't tell you enough. PatternBase matches you with growers who share your actual conditions (frost dates, rainfall patterns, climate type, soil texture) and surfaces what they're documenting.

Browse public gardens. See what's working for practitioners whose land actually behaves like yours. When you log observations and harvests, you contribute to that same picture for growers who come after you. It's not a recommendation engine guessing at what you might like. It's documented results from real gardens in similar conditions.

The idea of learning from your bioregion rather than from generic advice is one of the things I find most compelling about permaculture. The permaculture zones guide has more on why local observation matters more than universal rules.

Your garden becomes evidence

Every observation you log, every harvest you record, every photo you attach to a plant or guild. It all becomes part of a shared commons that makes the community's knowledge more grounded.

There's a lot of permaculture content online. Very little of it is backed by documented results. PatternBase is designed to change that slowly, garden by garden. When you record that your three-year apple guild is producing well with comfrey at the drip line and garlic chives in the inner zone, and a grower in a similar climate finds that record, your experience becomes useful evidence for their design decision.

This is what I mean when I say your garden becomes evidence. Not that your data gets extracted for some platform's benefit. That your observations, shared with growers in your bioregion, make the collective knowledge more true.

The knowledge library has 40+ articles covering guild design, succession planting, soil systems, sector analysis, and the full Mollison framework, all of it linked to the tools in the app so you can move between learning and applying.

What's Free

The free tier is genuinely useful. I didn't want to build a free plan that forces you to upgrade in the first five minutes.

Free tier includes: up to 3 gardens, full access to the 4,500+ plant library, 30 guild templates, the visual guild designer, observation logging, community browsing, and the full knowledge library. If you want to try a guild or two, document a season, and learn from what others are growing, that's all free, no trial period.

Grower plan ($5/month or $149 lifetime): unlimited gardens, multi-year perennial timelines, AI photo analysis, the Garden Coach chat, advanced yield analytics, and full community features including public profiles and follows.

The lifetime option is there because some people don't want to think about a subscription. You pay once, you have it. I'd rather have a small group of growers who use it deeply than a large group who churn after a month.

Your data is always exportable. No lock-in. If PatternBase disappears tomorrow, you keep your observations in a format you can use.

The Earth Care Fund

Twenty-five percent of every paid subscription goes to the Earth Care Fund.

I'm being direct about what that means in practice right now: in the early months, it's a small amount of money. But I wanted to build the commitment in from the beginning, before there was real revenue to protect.

The Earth Care Fund supports soil restoration, tree planting, and regenerative agriculture projects, the kind of work that the permaculture community has been doing on the ground for decades. As PatternBase grows, so does what that 25% can do.

Choosing the lifetime plan or a monthly subscription isn't just paying for software. It's putting a small fraction of that payment into the work PatternBase is designed to support.

What's Next

I'll be honest about where things stand and where they're going.

Building the community is the immediate priority. The tools work. What makes them more valuable is more documented gardens, more observations from diverse climates, and growers sharing what they're learning. The climate-matching and evidence commons features are only as good as the data behind them. That starts with early growers using the app seriously.

More plants. The library has 4,500+ species with permaculture-specific attributes, but there are gaps. I'll be adding species continuously, with an emphasis on regional varieties and the plants that show up repeatedly in guild designs across different climates.

Better succession planning. The multi-year timeline is functional, but I want to develop it further: more detail on establishment phases, better integration with the planting calendar, and the ability to model how shade patterns change as a food forest matures. The succession planting guide covers why this matters.

Mobile. The app works in mobile browsers right now, and it's installable as a PWA. A dedicated mobile app is on the roadmap, particularly for field use, logging observations while you're standing in the garden, not sitting at a desk.

None of that happens on a fixed timeline. I'm one person. I'll build what the community most needs, based on what growers actually use and ask for.

An Invitation

If you've designed a guild, planted a food forest, sheet-mulched a lawn, or tried to figure out when to plant based on your actual frost dates rather than a generic calendar, PatternBase was built for you.

Create your free account. Add your first garden. Log what you're growing this spring.

If something doesn't work, or a feature you need is missing, I want to know. I'm at james@pattern-base.com. I read every message.

The most useful thing you can do for the community right now is start documenting what's actually happening in your garden. What's establishing, what's struggling, what surprised you, what you'd do differently. That record, shared with growers in similar conditions, is more valuable than any design theory.

Let's start building the evidence.

-- James

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PatternBase is a free permaculture garden design tool for practitioners who track what actually grows. Create your free account and start documenting your garden this season.